Author: Robert Elessar

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But when they should endure the bloggy spur, they fall their crests, and like deceitful jades sink in the trial.

Wyoming-Quintet-Opus-1 (2)

Hello, good morning, and welcome to yet another Thursday.  I don’t know that I have much to write about today, but that’s never stopped me from writing before, and I see no need to let it do so now.  I’ll just start writing and see what happens.  If worse comes to worst, I suppose I’ll just have a short blog post.*

The editing of Unanimity is going reasonably well, as usual.  There’s not much new to say about it.  I’m more than halfway through the latest pass, but I still have quite a few run-throughs to go.  Well, okay, the actual integer number of run-throughs isn’t large, but when those numbers refer to the editing of a huge novel, they can still take quite a long time.  I wish I were independently wealthy, or at least able to make my living solely by writing.  Then I’d probably have been done with Unanimity by now, and on to some subsequent project, if there is to be any subsequent project.  Unfortunately, wishing for the counter-factual is an exercise in futility.  As the old saying goes, “If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.”  I think the situation is actually far more extreme than that, with respect to the number of wishes in the world, so my personal version of the saying is, “If wishes were horses, then we’d all be hip-deep in horse-shit.”

Which, in a certain sense, we already are.  So maybe it wouldn’t make much of a figurative difference.  Are horses as big a producer of greenhouse gasses per capita as cows are?  Maybe if wishes were horses, we could replace beef in our diets with “chevval” or something along those lines, and the world would be slightly better.  Or maybe it wouldn’t be.  Our gardens at least would have plenty of fertilizer.

I’ve written a new article for Iterations of Zero for this week, but I haven’t posted it yet, because I haven’t finished editing it.  It’s not that this has been a particularly busy week—though it has been busy—it’s just that I’ve had a hard time finding the energy and time to apply to IoZ in the midst of other things.  I just know that I put all that time and energy somewhere, but I think it might have gotten thrown away by accident the last time I moved.  In any case, I can’t seem to locate it no matter where I look.  I suppose that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Time can be a curse as well as a blessing, depending on the circumstances (while too much energy can be explosive, and in the extreme limit, can create a black hole).

As for everything else, well, there’s not much new in the world.  Of course, as always, there are specific “new” things, specific iterations of more generic types of events that keep occurring, but it’s important to recognize that such details are trivia, with little to no lasting consequence as compared to any other possible set of details.  At least, it’s important to me to recognize this, as much as something trivial can be important, and as much as something important can be trivial.

The weather in most of the United States has gotten quite cold over the past few days.  It’s even cooled down here in south Florida a bit, though not to an uncomfortable degree.  This has brought a bit of rain, and that’s mildly annoying, but it’s hardly unusual for a subtropical wetland—which is what this area is when left to its own devices.  In any case, the arrival of the “cold” months down here tends to entail a significant reduction in daily rainfall…and it’s more or less unheard-of for there to be snow in my neighborhood.  As the end of the year approaches, one really should hear in our local malls the carol, “I’m dreaming of a wet Christmas,” since the more traditional version is surely just a pipe dream.

To be honest, it’s been years, probably almost a decade, since I’ve even been in a mall (except when passing through on the way to see a movie, which has happened on three occasions).  Some of you may think that sounds enviable, and I’m sure you have your reasons, but I like malls, at least when they’re not too crowded.  They make me feel almost as if I’m in a slightly gaudy museum—a museum where I can, if I really like something that’s on display, buy it.  Malls were always truly fun and often exciting places to go with family…which is one of the main reasons I haven’t gone to one in so long.

Anyway, I’ve now said more than was merited by anything about which I had to speak (or to write, if you prefer to be pedantic, which is an urge I find it hard to criticize), so I should probably draw all of this to a close.**  To all of those reading—and to the vastly larger number of people who aren’t—I wish you well; indeed, I wish you all the best possible moments and outcomes in all areas of your lives and in all their intertwinings with all the other lives out there.

But we know what wishes are worth, don’t we?

TTFN

*I suspect there are many who think this is far from worse, let alone worst, but we’ll ignore them, since they must be masochists if they’re reading this despite their displeasure.  Okay, well, it’s too late to ignore them now, but we’ll at least give them no further attention.

**I’m sure there are those out there who think I should do so on a much more global level, top to bottom, side to side, in all possible senses.  As with the urge to be pedantic, I find it difficulty argue against such a point of view.

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A good old man, sir. He will be blogging. As they say, when the age is in, the wit is out.

Nobita crying

Hello and good morning.  It’s the first Thursday of a new month.  Back in the day, you’d have been able to look forward to next week’s episode of “My heroes have always been villains.”  Of course, it seems that I was the only person who ever looked forward to those episodes, which is why I stopped writing them (insert sigh here).  I guess the title, which I thought was a mildly clever play on the old Willie Nelson song title, was worrisome for most people.  Oh, well.  These things happen.

We’re into November, anyway.  Halloween, and October generally—which should include my two best days of the year, integrating over my whole life—is over.  It wasn’t much of an October, though.  Halloween was quite a disappointment.  I was one of three people who dressed up where I work…two, really, since one of the three just brought a mask that he put on occasionally.  And a total of only two trick-or-treaters came ‘round my neighborhood in the evening.  A separate, less universally noted occasion (which should have been a major life milestone) happened eleven days prior to Halloween and was also a thorough anticlimax.  In fact, it barely avoiding being a non-event.

And now, like many others, I’m irritated by the time change enacted last weekend.  It gets light “earlier” in the morning, which ought to be good, but this tends just to make me feel as though I must have overslept.  As someone who prefers to be early, I find this disquieting.  And, of course, the premature nightfall is irritating as well.  You wouldn’t think that someone who writes horror stories would be bothered by darkness coming sooner, but unfortunately, I tend to be rather strongly affected by the seasonal decrease in daylight.  Once October is over, I’d really prefer to sleep until the vernal equinox, and maybe longer.  By the time the winter the solstice arrives, I’m often so mired in gloom that it seems that it really could take three months of incessant bathing to wash it off.  Don’t worry, though, I’ll try not to let my blog posts become too much of a downer if I can help it.

Let’s see, what else is going on in my thoroughly exciting and captivating life?  Well, as always, I’m moving steadily along with the editing of Unanimity.  The trimming of the fat* from a novel is rather satisfying in a curious way.  It’s a little like when one carefully inks over a pencil sketch and then erases the underlying graphite once the ink is dry.  The product is so much neater and sharper…though occasionally, to my dismay, the inked drawing feels less alive and interesting than did the sketch beforehand.

I don’t know whether I’m really talking about drawing or writing here, or about something else entirely.

As for everything else, well…my life is really just too full and exciting to begin enumerating all the many events that unfold in it, but I’ll try.  First of all, I’m indulging my weakness for breathing on an almost continuous basis, despite all the air pollution to which I know I’m exposing myself.  What can I say?  I live on the edge.  I’ve also continued to go to work five or six days a week, since I’ve yet to be able to kick the habit of eating at least once a day, and that’s an expensive foible.  They say people with addictions will do insane and inexplicable things to satisfy their joneses, and I guess I’m a case in point.  Thankfully, I’ve at least been able to avoid the dangerous compulsion of socializing with other human beings.  That’s a vice that causes much trouble to many; I’m lucky not to be prone to it.

Sarcasm, now…that’s a craving I’ve not gotten under control at all.

Oh, I did write another blog post on Iterations of Zero, for those of you who haven’t followed it.  It’s basically about the joy and necessity of learning at least something of the wonders of math and science, which I wish received more respect than they do here in the U.S.  Unfortunately, their status seems only to be diminishing, though our lives are ever more dominated by technologies that are deeply dependent upon them. It’s disheartening to see a population so peculiarly averse to understanding the very things that underlie and maintain their lives and well-being (such as it is), but humans never have been particularly foresightful or insightful, have they?  Honestly, I don’t know what anyone sees in them.  Humans, I mean.

And with that, perhaps it’s a good time to call this week’s blog post to a close.  I know I haven’t really said much about much of any real substance, and one would think that such an exemplar of vacuity would be more at home in IoZ than here.  Still, the concept of iterations of zero is more than just a website title.  It’s a philosophy.  It’s a way of life.

I hope you are all as well as you can possibly be.  Though I may seem misanthropic at times, I’m really not.  I want you all to thrive and excel and succeed and grow and play your parts in an ever-improving world.

Maybe that’s just the fantasy writer in me.

TTFN

*Which sounds a little like some esoteric cultural or religious event.

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The first man that blogged, cried, “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

avatarofdeath2

Hello, good morning, and Happy Halloween to you all!  I hope all of you who celebrate the holiday enjoy yourselves, either by dressing up* and having sweets and treats, or by giving out such sweets and treats to the young’uns who come around trick-or-treating (perhaps dressing up to do so).  If you choose not to celebrate the holiday merely because of some religious misgivings that make you worry that to do so would somehow be pagan…well, all I can say is, those concerns are no more realistic than are all the ghosts, goblins, zombies and vampires, and they’re usually not as much fun.  But that’s your business, and as long as you don’t interfere with anyone else, you can do what you want.  Or not do what you don’t want.

Some of my readers will have already seen an article I posted on Iterations of Zero this week, stating my intention to use spare time during my work days to write and post there at least once a week.  There’s much more breadth of subject matter available to be pursued on IoZ, because it’s very much in the spirit of “Seinfeld”, being a blog about nothing…at least nothing in particular.  As I think I wrote when I introduced that blog’s title, it’s possible that the whole universe has a net energy of zero (balancing all the positive energy and matter with the negative energy of gravity), in which case we all—everything—are just iterations of zero.  It’s sort of like the credit economy.  When you only have iterations of zero, everything is far game.

Anyway, I plan for that to be an ongoing process.  And though we all know with what substance the road to Hell is paved, I hope that by declaring my intentions here and in IoZ, I at least put the pressure of avoiding embarrassment upon myself to keep me going.**

On to other matters.  Unanimity proceeds at a steady pace.  I’d say I’m almost halfway through the editing/rewriting process, which may not seem like a lot to those who’ve been paying attention, but when you’re dealing with a novel whose first draft was over half a million words long, you need to be patient.  In any case, it’s a Halloween-worthy effort, being a horror novel, though it’s only vaguely supernatural.  I do throw into it a passing reference to another of my stories, one that I’m tempted to explicate here…but I think I’ll leave it at just saying that the story referenced is one that is truly worthy of Halloween.

Unanimity is definitely a horrifying story, of course—hopefully only in the narrative sense, not in quality—and I’ve again reached a point in the book where more and more terrible things are happening.  I can only console the characters affected by saying that they can be born again anytime someone starts the book over.  This is probably little consolation, since the same dark things will happen to them every time the story unfolds.

Such is the fate of characters in novels.

It may be that such is the fate of us all, come to think of it.  As I’ve discussed elsewhere (in a blog about “playing with space-time blocks”), it’s possible, according to some interpretations of General Relativity, that all of time may pre-exist, so to speak.  This is the origin of Einstein’s attributed statement that, to the convinced physicist, time is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.  If that’s the case, we may end our lives only to restart them, as if we were but characters in a novel or a movie.  Still, we do know that GR can’t be quite right as it is, because it doesn’t properly integrate the uncertainty principle and other aspects of quantum mechanics which appear to be inescapable.  If we throw in the Everettian possibilities of many worlds, diverging at every occurrence of quantum decoherence (not at every place a human is faced with a choice, contrary to popular belief and popular fiction), there may be many possible fixed versions of ourselves.  This can be both a comfort and a nightmare, because as Carl Sagan once pointed out, while we can certainly imagine other versions of our lives that could be much better than they are, we can also—and perhaps more readily—imagine versions in which things are much, much worse.  Such is the nature of reality; there is no obvious bottom level to it.

Oh, well, c’est la vie.  As Camus tells us (if memory serves), there can be meaning, honor, and satisfaction even in the endless, repetitive task of rolling a boulder to the top of a hill only to have it roll down again each time, if that’s the existence to which you are fated.  I suspect that Marcus Aurelius would agree with him.  At least, the version of the Emperor that lives in my mind would agree with the version of Camus who lives there as well.  It’s an interesting forum up there in my cerebrum, though it does get tedious and pretentious at times.

Which is one reason why it’s good to indulge in silly frivolities like Halloween, in which we make light of things that might otherwise terrify us, and by embracing them divest them of their power.  Most importantly, it can be a lot of fun.  Life is short, and, as Weird Al Yankovic pointed out, “You’re dead for a real long time.”  You might as well try to have at least a little fun here and there as long as you’re not.

Again, Happy Halloween!

TTFN

 

*I’m dressed up at the office in an all-in-black version of the character in the picture above.  I’m sort of an amalgam of The Gunslinger and The Man in Black.  I don’t think that’s too presumptuous; after all, my father’s name was Roland.

**Though my regular readers may have their doubts about whether avoiding embarrassment is something that ever concerns me at all.

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Remember thee! Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat in this distracted blog.

 

pumpkin demon cropped

Hello and good morning!  It’s Thursday, so it’s blog day, as is probably unnecessary to point out, since you’re reading this.  Still, you might be reading it at some later date, and not have realized on which day of the week it was written.  So, perhaps it’s okay that I start most of my blogs with the usual repetitive reminder.

Be that as it may, this Thursday is special, because it’s one week until Halloween, my favorite holiday—for what are probably obvious reasons if you’ve read my stories.  Given the time of year, I thought to myself yesterday that I’d read something good and seasonal, i.e. a horror story…one of my own.  I started with Prometheus and Chiron, but I realized soon that it was simply too dark and terrible for me right now*.  Instead, I went to Welcome to Paradox City and started to read its the second entry:  If the Spirit Moves You, which is set the day before Halloween.  Though the story begins with the protagonist seeing a ghost, it’s not dark or scary at all.

I’m a little sad not to be publishing any horror stories this year around Halloween.  It would be a nice pseudo-tradition to carry forward, but I just really don’t want to get distracted from editing Unanimity, which is coming along nicely, but which is soooooo lengthy a process.  If I were to write something new while working on it, it would slow everything down, and that’s just too discouraging to allow.

It’s a particular shame, though, because over the years I’ve learned that writing new stories is a good way to mitigate my dysthymia/depression, which otherwise makes me almost as unbearable to others as it makes me to me.  This is especially true in the morning; often by mid-afternoon my mood and temper begin to swing upward and I’m actually capable not just of facial expressions, but even the occasional tiny smile.  Until that time of day, my face feels not so much paralyzed as embalmed.

Thankfully, depression isn’t truly contagious…though those who suffer from it are well-advised not to come to me for cheering up early in the day.  I’m as likely to talk them further down into the pit as to lift their spirits.  This wouldn’t be out of cruelty or malice; it would just be me expressing my honest thoughts and feelings at the time.

Anyway, enough of such dark things, we were talking about Halloween and scary stories.  Once I’d started re-reading If the Spirit Moves You, I was inspired to listen to the YouTube upload of another Halloweeney story this morning on my commute.  That is, of course, Hole for a Heart, which—though certainly dark—is not as bad as Prometheus and Chiron (also available to listen to on YouTube).  I’m enjoying it, even despite listening to my voice reading it, which as anyone who’s listened to recordings of themselves would predict, never sounds quite like how I hear my voice in my head**.

I’m truly blessed to be an author who enjoys reading—and listening to—his own stories.  This may seem narcissistic, but it’s not merely egotistical.  I really do, honestly like my stories.  And, of course, at this time of year, I’d love very much to share them with as many people as I can.  So, please, if you have a spare bit of time, give a listen to one of my short stories on YouTube.  These include I for one welcome our new computer overlords, Prometheus and Chiron, and Hole for a Heart.  I haven’t done audio of Penal Colony (which isn’t really Halloweeney, anyway), or Free Range Meat (which definitely suits the holiday).  Perhaps I’ll do those sometime soon.  Reading a short story aloud is much less daunting than is reading a novel; I stopped after nine chapters of The Chasm and the Collision, because I wasn’t getting enough feedback to justify the ongoing effort.  But, if those of you interested in some spooky stories give some of these a listen (and, if interested, if you buy an e-book version, each of which is less than a buck on Amazon), and especially if you tell me you enjoy them, I’d probably be inspired to do some more, and maybe even to finish up CatC.  Who knows what might come after that?

So, I not only invite, but I attempt to cajole, you to give the stories a whirl.

Next week’s blog will come on Halloween proper, so I’m likely to go on even a bit more about scary tales and related phenomena.  I hope you all have a fun time in the week leading up to it.  Attend some work-based (or school-based) Halloween parties, eat some sweet treats, dress up as your favorite Halloween-themed character***, and enjoy yourself!  By celebrating the dark, the supernatural, and the death-related, we really are celebrating life, it seems to me, and more so on Halloween than on any other holiday.  It’s only when you really feel you have a handle on something that you’ll willfully expose yourself to a source of fear just for fun.

Maybe that’s why Prometheus and Chiron is harder for me to reread.  Maybe I don’t have as good a handle on the stuff in there as I’d like to have.

Well, you can judge for yourself.  In the meantime, have a wonderful, spooky, and candy-filled week!

TTFN

headless horseman cropped

*I’m not just saying that to hype my own work.  It’s simply that the fate of the main character, and the cause of that fate, are too dreadful, given my own history and tendency toward gloom.  Of course, I have only myself to blame, since I wrote the story.

**This is especially true of people like me who have conductive hearing loss.  My own voice sounds much louder and clearer to me than other people’s voices do, and also much louder and clearer than it does to them.  Individuals with conductive hearing loss tend to speak softly, while those with sensorineural hearing loss tend to speak more loudly.  This has been your Medical Moment™.

***And don’t worry too much about political correctness when you do.

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Give me your hands if we be friends, and Robert shall restore amends

wine glass shatter

 

Buenos días, ohaiyou gozaimasu, and good morning!  Welcome to another jueves, Mokuyoubi, and Thursday.  It’s that day of the week, by any other name, on which I write my blog posts, and that’s just what I’m going to do.

I must warn you, however, that I’m currently suffering from the viral respiratory infection that’s going around the office.  More specifically, I’m in about the second full day of the thing, which is often among the worst, when all the cytokines and other inflammatory and immune mediators are floating around the body, triggering low-grade fevers, chills, aches and pains, as well as poor sleep (something to which I’m at least reasonably accustomed).  In other words, I may be at less than my optimal writing state, and I may further be in less than an ideal state for evaluating the quality of my writing.  So, if you find that this blog post is irritating or incoherent or simply stupid, I ask you please to cut me some slack.

Basically, I’m giving myself excuses for not doing as good a job as I—and presumably you—might like me to do.  Perhaps the fickle Spirit of Human Charity will even work to my advantage in this, and this blog post will be popular even if it’s not great.  How cool would that be?  If only I always had such excuses*.

Okay, sorry about that bit of auto-derision.  I’m currently reading a light novel series in which the main character/narrator is a cynical loner who ends up doing good things for other people more or less against his will, despite being a natural outsider.  That thought style resonates with me perhaps a bit too strongly…though I’ve come to my personal attitude thanks to fifty years (minus three days) of experience, whereas Hikigaya Hachiman reached that stage of enlightenment** by the time he was in high school.  I suppose there are prodigies in any area of expertise.  Also, he’s fictional; as far as I know, I’m not.

It’s good to be reading fiction again, though I think “Oregairu” is about the only one for which I’d have any stomach right now.  It’s a unique story with a unique protagonist—almost an anti-hero, but not quite—and it’s been made into a two-season anime, which I’ve already watched more than once.  It was very well done, and very true to the books, so I already know what’s going to happen, but that’s never been a problem for me.  God knows how often I’ve read The Lord of the Rings and enjoyed it every time.  Ditto for many other high-quality tales.

I’ve heard of a study that claimed to find that audiences and readers enjoy a story more when they already know the outcome (more or less).  I’m not sure how robust or convincing this study was, but there’s little doubt that audiences of almost all movies, books, shows, etc. have a good idea going in how most stories will end.  “The rest is commentary,” as they say.  Though, of course, they also say the devil is in the details…which is particularly true in most of my writing, though perhaps not in the sense usually intended.

Speaking of my writing, I’ve almost completed the third editing run-through of Unanimity.  Indeed, I just finished the main arc of the story yesterday, and only the denouement remains.  I feel a little silly relating this, but the climax of the story literally brought tears to my eyes.  Mainly this is because the characters involved were crying, and when I write and edit, I try to sort of act out the scenes in my head, and I often speak the dialogue aloud; it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m great at writing heart-wrenching fiction.  I’ll sometimes tear up when singing songs from The Phantom of the Opera or The Long and Winding Road or Empty Garden and similar, just because that’s the mood of the songs***.  Also, being prone as I am to depression, the resonant frequencies of my brain simply respond to minor keys—literally and figuratively—most powerfully.

Perhaps that’s why some people are prone to depression:  their mental circuitry is arranged such that it “vibrates” most energetically in response to dark inputs.  And, unfortunately, as when a crystal wine glass resonates with an opera singer’s voice, sometimes these harmonics can cause a thing to shatter.

I’m probably pushing the analogy too far.

Anyway, the bottom line is that the editing of Unanimity is coming along well, though I still have a long way to go.  I think it’s getting better with each round of the process, so it’s pretty satisfying.  It’s quite nice to enjoy one’s own stories, after all…and I can pretty much say that I enjoy all of mine.  I think some of my earlier works really needed a bit more fine-tuning than they received, but I guess I can still go back and improve them in the fullness of time.  Life is always a work in progress.  As they say, it’s all about the journey, not the destination…which is pretty much trivially obvious, when you think about it, since the destination is always the same no matter what.

And even dark and forbidding scenery can sometimes still be cool to look at along the way, if you can just catch it from the right angle.

TTFN

*I can’t really count depression as an ongoing excuse, since it’s more or less my baseline, and might even bring a kind of Goth/Punk/Horror coolness to my general attitude.  Okay, probably not, but it would be nice to think so.

**Endarkenment?

***Though, to be fair, these examples are truly exceptional works, whereas my own writing is evocative to me mainly because it’s my writing.  If it doesn’t resonate with me, then there’s something deeply wrong.

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The man that hath no music in himself…is fit for treasons, stratagems and blogs

galileo math

some of Galileo’s figuring

Good morning, all.  It’s Thursday, so—as per usual—it’s time for another weekly blog post.  Here we go!

I’ve had a mildly underproductive editing week, because last Friday, Saturday, and then this Monday, I got wrapped up in completing my latest song, Come Back Again.  If you’re interested, you can listen to it on YouTube, here on my website, or on my Facebook page.  It’s also posted in audio-only format on Iterations of Zero.  If anyone wants, I could send you an mp3 copy; that seems vanishingly unlikely, though.  The only people who seem to listen to my songs are immediate family members and similarly unfortunate, obligated people.  I do think the song is surprisingly decent, considering I did it using only two electric guitars (not at the same time), two smartphone rhythm apps (sampled and altered in various ways), a very cheap desktop keyboard, an actual desktop with smartphone for some of the percussion, and the amazing free audio editing software Audacity.  Oh, and of course, a microphone and voice recording program for the singing.  I suppose you could add pens and paper for writing the words and music.  All in all, not much was needed.

It’s curious that, in order to publish my songs effectively, I need to make “videos” of them, even though the visuals only consist of the icon from my Iterations of Zero website.  I don’t even use the icon from this site, because that’s just my face, and I can’t imagine anyone wanting to look at my face long enough to listen to a song.

It’s interesting, though, that one can readily upload videos to Facebook (and Twitter, I think), but they don’t easily let you share simple audio files.  As a stereotypical standup comedian might say, “What’s that all about?”  It’s a little odd that everyone wants to upload videos and pictures ad infinitum to sites like Facebook and Instagram—as they presume, without any discernable justification, that other people want to look at them—but not audio.  Yet the latter can be appreciated even while commuting, even while driving, as the wonder of audiobooks and podcasts (and radio) demonstrates.

Perhaps I’m just a curmudgeon*, but I feel that most videos shared by ordinary people, and often even by professionals, are just talking faces with nonspecific backgrounds relating matters that could be communicated purely by voice (or—God forbid—the written word!).

Anyway, my song is out there.  As I’ve said before, making and releasing these songs really is a vanity project for me, not just in the egotistical sense of the word, but also in the sense of it being in vain…pointless.  The latter sense of the term applies to me far more often than does the former.  Though I have a reasonably good opinion of my ability to perform tasks of various kinds, and to master subjects with a fair amount of depth, I am not vain in the narcissistic sense about much.  I have no illusions about the importance of anything I do or make or its value to anyone else.  Mostly, I’m just a proverbial Voice Crying Out in the Wilderness ™**.  Or, to be a little less pretentious, I’m a case of “I am, I said,” with not even furniture taking note of the declaration.

Nevertheless, since Tuesday I have returned to my usual schedule of working on Unanimity.  I’ve encountered an interesting place where the way I wrote the book has shifted character times slightly…meaning I had to go back in time from events of an immediately preceding section to catch up with what was happening to other characters.  This is common, of course, since we can’t skip back and forth sentence by sentence to see that one character is doing in “real time” while something is happening to another.

But I think I’m going to have to adjust it.  I think the story will flow better if I take the section in question and transplant it to just before the immediately preceding section.  This is a minor enough change, and I think most authors probably do it often, but it’s interesting to me because I don’t think I’ve ever needed to do it before.  Usually when I write something, it comes out pretty much as the story is “meant” to flow.  Unfortunately, Unanimity is just such a long novel, with so much going on, often to characters in separate locations, that it wasn’t all going to come out quite in optimal order on the first draft.  Not to say it wouldn’t be tolerable in its current form—it would be—but it wouldn’t be ideal, from my point of view.

That’s all probably not interesting to anyone else but me.

Meanwhile, speaking of audio (I was, you can go back and check), I’m “currently” listening to a wonderful book called Infinite Powers:  How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe.  I highly recommend it.  Seriously.  Even if you’re not a math type person (though I have to admit that I am one, a bit), I think it will give you easy-to-understand but clear and real insights into not just why calculus—and mathematics in general—is so useful to nearly everything of substance in science and technology*** but also why it’s so breathtakingly beautiful that some people are utterly captivated by it and pursue it hour after hour, year after year, even in their spare time.

Galileo famously said that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.  And someone else said (I can’t find the credit for the quote), “Physicists defer only to mathematicians, and mathematicians defer only to God.”  We can imagine universes where the charge and mass of an electron are different than they are here, or where coupling constants and the cosmological constant and the ratio of the strength of the gravitational to the electromagnetic force are different—and we can readily imagine life forms whose genetic data isn’t encoded in DNA…but it’s impossible to conceive of a logically consistent universe in which the square root of two is the ratio of two integers, or in which there is a largest prime number.

Maybe God defers to mathematicians.  Or maybe He just is one.

And with that bit of casual blasphemy, I think I’ve done enough damage for this week.  I hope you’re all well, and that you’re enjoying listening to, reading, watching, and doing whatever it is that—when integrated under the curve of your lifespan—makes your existence as joyful and fulfilling as possible.

TTFN

*There’s no “perhaps” about me being a curmudgeon; the “perhaps” refers to whether I’m merely a curmudgeon, or if there’s more to me than that.  The jury is still out.

**Actually, I’m quite sure that’s not from the book of Proverbs; I think it’s from Isaiah or Ezekiel.  Let me check…
…yes, it’s from Isaiah.

***Which, in the modern world, means pretty much everything, full stop.

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Come Back Again (a new song)

Words and Music by Robert Elessar

(c) copyright 2019.  All rights reserved.

Performed by Robert Elessar

Produced by Robert Elessar

Sky blue
Sky gray
Dark and stormy night
Sunny day
Only meeting strangers
Always losing friends
Every new beginning
Always ends.

And if your travels bring you to a place
Where you’re afraid to show your face
remember
All you’ll be is all you’ve been,
So turn around, come back again.

Walking down the street
I saw a car go by with no one driving
I watched it pass and wondered what the hell was going on.
There’s something not quite right, I thought
and hopped a bus that was just arriving
I got it and I sat down fine, but suddenly
I was gone.

Sky blue
Sky black
Creeping slowly forward
Falling back
Nothing ever stops
But nothing really goes
Is there any reason?
No one knows.

But I’d stay by you until the end
In times of darkness I’m your friend
So maybe
If you need
A helping hand
Just turn around
Come back again.

Come back again.

Come back again.

Come back again.

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The teeming Autumn blog with rich increase

flame-maple-tree-autumn-blaze-almost-at-peak-amur-pruning-florida-red

Good morning, and good Thursday.  It’s blog day, of course, and I hereby officially welcome you all to another weekly post.

My experiment with tags last week worked very well, i.e. labeling my post with the tags “sex,” “drugs,” and “rock ‘n’ roll.”  I’m not up to doing such a thing on a regular basis, though.  In fact, I doubt that I’ll do it more than once.  Of course, it may be that those inaccurate tags simply weren’t as off-putting as the ones I’d used the previous week, which upon reflection might have seemed weird and (incorrectly) New Agey.  I think one of them was something along the lines of “cosmic caring,” and that’s bound to make a discerning reader want to keep his or her astronomical distance.  I can’t blame them.  I’m too embarrassed even to go back and look at what my other tags were.

Of course, it may be that the post from two weeks ago was just too dry and dreary to be endured.  I tend to be that way when in a glum mood, and I’m sure that even hypothetical people who are really, deeply interested even in my darkest thoughts* would find my melancholier musings stultifying.  Even my humor tends to be dark, and though I do try when I can to make my darkness humorous, I know it’s still probably unpleasant.

On a lighter note:  I got my vehicle back yesterday, after almost two weeks without it.  I was so pleased that, even though I got thoroughly soaked just riding it back from the shop to work**, I was as happy as a pig in shit.  Even by the time I got home, I was still borderline giddy.  I doubt that I’ve smiled that much since, oh, maybe 2011 at the latest.

Taking the train has been good for me in some ways, though.  I’ve been forced to walk between 2.5 and 5 miles a day, and I can tell that it’s had a beneficial effect on my endurance.  My back, however, which as I noted last week has been experiencing an exacerbation of its chronic pain, has not been pleased!  Having no stegosaurus-style brain with which to be able to articulate its concerns, or with which to understand the necessity of the extra work I was giving it, it mulishly insisted upon reminding me with every breath that it was pissed at me.

Human backs are stupid.

Thankfully, the train, and my habitual early hours, continued to allow me to edit.  Unanimity is getting whittled away, as I strive to remove all the bits of it that don’t look like a good pseudo-sci-fi horror novel.  I still like the story, and I still like the characters—including the “bad guy”—so that helps a lot.  Even if I didn’t, I think I’d be able just to push myself through as a matter of stubbornness, something with which I’ve been endowed in great quantities, but I’m glad it’s not necessary.

And in other news, I can’t let the arrival of October go unheralded.  It’s generally my favorite month, because Halloween is my favorite holiday.  Once it’s over, the steady shortening of the daylight hours becomes pronounced enough the wear me out.  By the arrival of the Winter Solstice, I’m often so affected by the season (get it?) that I feel like celebrating the holidays with a game of Russian Roulette***.

October, however, is still fun, though in south Florida it’s lamentably un-autumnal.  This will be the first year in a few (I think) that I won’t have a new horror short story to release around Halloween, which is a bit disappointing, but Unanimity is such a big project that I want to make it the sole focus of my fiction work.  I hope it will be worth the wait.  It’s ambitious, at the very least, even if I can say nothing else about it without subjective bias.

I am still finding myself sidetracked here and there by music; I’m working on another new/old song and have early work done on a few fully new ones, but those really are a personal indulgence, a set of vanity projects if you will.  I have no idea whether anyone would ever willingly listen to them if they didn’t know me.  My stories, I think, can stand on their own.  Maybe I’m wrong.  I guess, ultimately, it doesn’t matter, since I’m writing them because I want to write them, just as I’m doing the songs because I want to do them, and I can only offer whatever I am for others to waste or hold as they see fit.

Speaking of wasting, that’s probably enough blogging for today.  Including the footnotes, this post is already over a thousand words long.  Once I get going, I’m hard to shut up.  It’s lucky for all of you that I have a day job, or I’d probably be doing this more often, and even the kindest of readers might lose patience.  Perhaps there are Everettian branches where that’s happened, or maybe there’s some infinitely repeated version of me that meets that description somewhere out in one of the other versions of the multiverse—if any of them exist (if you’re unfamiliar with this subject matter, you couldn’t get a better introduction to it than Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality, which I recommend unreservedly).

And, really, now, I must be going.  I hope you all have a wonderful day, a wonderful remainder of the week, and a wonderful month.  In fact, why stop there?  I hope you have a wonderful future for as long as you’re able.

TTFN

*I don’t recommend it.

**My “vehicle” is a scooter…though it’s a scooter with a 600cc engine, so it’s really just a motorcycle with automatic transmission.  It provides no protection from the rain, which rather hilariously was absent right until the day when my scooter was ready to ride again.

***I did that very thing once at that time of year.  I lost that game, unfortunately, as should be obvious from the fact that I’m here and writing.  But, of course, as with all such games of chance, the odds are against you, and the house usually wins.

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You blog an infinite deal of nothing

Hollywood_Amtrak_Tri-Rail

Hello, good morning, and welcome, as always, to another Thursday edition of my weekly blog post.  I’m riding the train today—as I have all this week and from the end of last week—because my poor vehicle is in the shop.  It’s a bit frustrating, but also weirdly nostalgic, and the extra walking I must do has forced me to realize just how little walking I’ve been doing lately.  I’ve gotten terribly out of shape.  As testament to that fact, though I can’t be certain it’s related, at the beginning of this week, I slipped while getting out of the shower—nothing severe, don’t worry; I didn’t fall down or even have to grab anything to right myself—and my back has consequently suffered a severe exacerbation of its already chronic “failed back surgery syndrome” pain.  This makes riding the train more of an adventure than it might be otherwise, to say nothing of simply going to work, but such is the way of things.  In the words of the Dread Pirate Roberts, “Like is pain…anyone who says differently is selling something.”

Speaking of pain, I was very disappointed by the reception to my blog post last week.  This is really a euphemistic way of saying I’m disappointed in the post itself, since there’s surely no one to blame but me if it didn’t do well.  For the first time in a very long while, my Thursday blog post didn’t get even one single “like”.  And I’m just not capable of “liking” my own post.

I’m honestly not sure what it was about that post that was so unappealing.  I didn’t feel that the writing was particularly bad, but maybe it was.  I had, just a few days earlier and after a four month “course”, come off Saint John’s Wort, and maybe that affected my writing style or quality.  Maybe it was just that I used a bad collection of “tags” to highlight the post.*  If there’s anyone out there who had the courage to force their way through it and has an objective (or not) assessment to give me, I’d appreciate it.

As I said, it’s a bit nostalgic for me to be riding the train again, not least because it was at the train station in Hollywood, Florida that I received the inspiration for my story Prometheus and Chiron, which I like a lot, even if no one else does.  (I have no reason to think that no one else likes it, but I similarly have no way to know if anyone does…there are no reviews on Amazon for it, though maybe there’s something on “Goodreads”, and I just didn’t look closely enough.)  It is, however, just a bit frustrating to ride the train when one’s back pain makes one feel, and move, as though one were ninety years old…and not a particularly healthy ninety, at that.

Still, I’ve done some good, or at least extensive, writing on trains and/or buses throughout the years.  Thanks to the existence of very small laptop computers (and even smartphones!), I can write on the train without subsequently having to decipher and transcribe my own atrocious handwriting afterwards**.  I’ve had to do such transcription before, with both Mark Red and with The Chasm and the Collision (neither of which was written on a train or bus, however; they were written at Florida State Prison, which is less bumpy but which has its own drawbacks), and I can assure you, as a fun thing to do to pass the time, it’s highly overrated.

Speaking of such things, the editing and rewriting of Unanimity continues as always; and it does feel like forever, sometimes. It’s still enjoyable to read as I edit, which I guess is a good thing.  I always aspire to the mental state of being someone who generally likes the story, but who is fed up with it just enough to be critical about its flaws so that I can correct them with a ruthless but well-meaning attitude.  That’s the ideal, but as Run DMC said, it’s tricky.  Anyway, it’s coming along, slowly but surely, and hopefully it will be finished sometime before I die, or before the world ends, whichever comes first***.

In other news…well, there’s not much other news, come to think of it.  Of course, I’m sure there’s “news” out there in the world; there always is, if you’re looking.  Some of it might even just possibly be relatively important, even on a long-term scale (though the majority, I’d guess, is indistinguishable from random gossip around a water cooler—and though biologists and anthropologists say that gossip served and continues to serve important social functions regarding reputation and trustworthiness, etc., I can’t help but find it appalling, embarrassing, and worthy of contempt; say of me what you will).  My own life, however, tends to be repetitive and tedious, and would make very poor viewing, even ignoring the deeply unattractive protagonist.

My imagination, however, is thankfully and sometimes joyfully fertile.  Einstein is quoted as having said that imagination is more important than knowledge.  I’m very fond of both, but I do think that without imagination it’s hard even to arrive at knowledge of any but the simplest of subjects.  How, after all, are you to construct a mental model of a concept if you can’t imagine such a model?

Well, to quote the immortal (and, perforce, imaginary) Forrest Gump, “That’s all I have to say about that.”  This is not quite true, of course.  I could probably go on and on ad infinitum, and I’m sure some of you feel that I already have.  But, anyway, I’ll hold off any further mental meanderings until next week, and simply wish you all the very best of all that is possible, both individually and collectively.

TTFN

*I decided to use the tags “sex”, “drugs”, and “rock ‘n’ roll” for this post to see if it makes a difference.

**Handwriting made all the worse by the bumping and jostling of a moving train or bus.  Those who know how bad my script is, in and of itself, can only imagine with dread the nightmare of such Lovecraftian output.  The horror…the horror…

***Of course, from my point of view, the two events are equivalent.

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So in the world. ‘Tis furnished well with blogs

wow

Good morning!  Welcome to yet another blog post, since this is yet another Thursday.  They do seem to keep coming and coming, don’t they?  Thursdays, I mean.  Thursdays have been going on for a lot longer than blog posts have been, and they’re likely to continue long after my blog posts have stopped.

Of course, on a cosmic level, the very notion of dividing time into days, each representing roughly a revolution of the Earth on its axis, is highly local and arbitrary.  The naming of days—such as naming one of a continuously repeated seven after a Norse thunder god known to most people nowadays as a character played by Chris Hemsworth—is even more local and arbitrary.

One “day” on Jupiter is only ten hours long, despite the fact that Jupiter’s diameter is ten times as great as the Earth’s.  This rapid revolution contributes to some truly amazing weather patterns on that planet.  A “day” on the moon, on the other hand, is about twenty-eight Earth days long…and there’s no weather there at all.

A day on Mercury, named after the wing-footed messenger god of Greek mythology, is almost sixty Earth days long.  And all these variations are just a few of the ones represented within our solar system, itself a tiny, tiny pixel in our galaxy (a “day” of which is a quarter billion Earth years long), which is in turn just a tiny, tiny splotch among hundreds of billions to about a trillion galaxies in the observable universe.  And that, of course, is only a chunk—miniscule to infinitesimal—of a much larger region of spacetime that seems likely to be infinite.

But don’t worry.  Your personal, day-to-day concerns still really matter.  Sure, they do.

Okay, sorry about that bit of sarcasm.  I’m pretending to be more cynical than I really am.  Your individual, day-to-day concerns do matter, in the only way that anything can matter:  they matter to you.  Meaning, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.  This is good, and can be highly life-affirming, unless you’re one of the unlucky people who feels that they themselves don’t matter, even to themselves.  For such people, the crushing weight of reality can feel at once both infinitely oppressive and at the same time very much worthy of a “meh.”  As a person who writes horror stories, among other things, I can honestly say that this is real horror.

Some horror fiction expresses a sense of being lost and trapped in a hostile and very large universe, which cares about us only as irritating insects, and seeks to crush us as such.  A similar notion is occasionally (metaphorically) invoked even by such science educators as Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has been heard to speak of “all the ways the universe wants to kill us,” or words to that effect.  But of course, this is a highly narcissistic misinterpretation of reality, used only as a figure of speech by Tyson (in order to emphasize certain points) and as a plot conceit for horror.  If the universe really “wanted” to kill us, we would be dead.  Instantly.

The real horror, from the reflexively hubristic, human point of view, is that the universe doesn’t give a tiny little rat’s ass about us.  As far as we know, the only place in the universe that’s even capable of caring about anything at all is in the minds of humans…and perhaps other sentient creatures.  As far as we know, only here on Earth (and in low Earth orbit) does caring exist at all.  Now, depending on the likelihood first of the origin of life, then of multicellular life, then of intelligent life, there may be many other such islands of caring in the universe, and if the universe is infinite in size, simple math reveals that there must be an infinite number of such islands.  But it’s equally simple to see that there is a proportionally larger infinity of places where there’s nothing that cares about anything.  This is far from the worst way things could be.  If there really were a Crimson King, or a Morgoth, or an Azathoth and Nyarlathotep and Cthulhu* out there, we would be in for a much rougher time than we actually experience.

Of course, as physicist and pioneer of quantum computation David Deutsch argues beautifully in his book The Beginning of Infinity, we humans—and our descendants, whether biological or technological or both—have the potential really to become significant on a cosmic scale.  As he also points out, there is no guarantee that we will do so, but there appears to be nothing in the laws of nature that prevents it.  It’s up to us** to decide.

That cosmic importance or lack thereof, however, does not and cannot change what is happening right here, right now, and which seems for the moment so inescapably important:  That it is Thursday, and that I am writing this blog post…and, of course, consequently, that you are reading it.  Nothing can ever actually be more important than “now,” because “now,” ultimately, is all we ever experience.

And now, I leave you with a brief update:  Unanimity proceeds well, shrinking as I edit it much more slowly than it grew as I wrote it, like a volcanic island having sprung forth to be subsequently eroded in the middle of a vast sea of strained and overused similes.  It’s got quite a ways to go before it’s a lush, tropical setting that you’d want to put on your vacation itinerary, but it’s getting there.  If you do visit, I won’t guarantee that it will be a uniformly happy trip—some very bad things indeed do lurk there—but at least it should be interesting.

TTFN

*A curious side-note:  of these three examples of entities from H. P. Lovecraft’s worlds, only Cthulhu appears well-known enough not to be marked for correction by Microsoft Word’s spell-checker.

**And of course, to our continued luck in avoiding cosmic catastrophes that are, for the moment, utterly beyond our power to prevent or avoid.