Creative Writing

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And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running blogs…

Hello, good morning, and happy Thursday.  It’s the last Thursday of the month of November in 2018 (AD or CE).  The biggest holiday month of the year approaches, filling children with joy and their elders with various species of dread, stress, and financial worries.

As revealed last week, on Thanksgiving, I unearthed a digital copy of my old short story, Solitaire.  I have laboured on it since, editing it/rewriting it, and even sharing a copy of it with my employer (and a few coworkers).  It’s short enough that he read it in one evening, and the next day—smiling—he told me that I was fucked in the head.  This is just the sort of reaction I expected and for which I had hoped, and he clearly meant it well, so I was happy.

Because Solitaire is a truly short story (a relative rarity for me), the process of rewriting and editing it is going much more quickly, as a percentage of the work remaining to be done, than it usually would.  I expect it to be ready for publication quite soon.  It certainly won’t be available in time for the beginning of Hanukkah, but it should almost certainly be out before Christmas.  Though, to be fair, it’s not a Christmas-ey story.

For those who might be afraid that Solitaire’s discovery would distract and detract from my ongoing work, I say, “Fear not!” (in the words of the Christmas angel).  I’ve still been hard at work editing and rewriting Penal Colony (a more drawn out process than it is for Solitaire, but just as fun), and above all I’ve been writing steadily on Unanimity.  It’s getting very close to the end, now, which is quite exciting for me.  I think I predicted once, back when I was young and innocent and so many things seemed possible, that I would complete the first draft of Unanimity before the end of the year.  This, I think, was overly optimistic.  However, we’re not going to be much into 2019 before I get there.  Then, it will take much less time to whip it into final, publishable form than it was to write it in the first place.

After that, of course, my short story In the Shade awaits completion, and then the book Neko/Neneko, to which I’m very much looking forward, then perhaps a second edition of Mark Red, with an eye toward then writing the second and third volumes of that series.  And, of course, I’m going to continue to write my short stories as little breaks and diversions, and as I’ve said before, I’ll be putting them together into a collection soon (the ones that haven’t been released in paperback yet).

But it doesn’t end there; don’t get your hopes up!  No, I have other books and short stories and series of books coming down the pike, like the ominous approach of the hosts of Mordor, or Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane Hill.  I’ll tease you with a few tentative titles, which you’ll hopefully be encountering more often in days to come:  Changeling in a Shadow World; The Dark Fairy and the Desperado; a possible recreation of my two lost novels from my younger days, Ends of the Maelstrom and, of course, Vagabond (which I may change to The Vagabond).  I also have thoughts of a horror novel called Entropy, and other books as well.

I hope I’ll be able to get them all written before some global catastrophe takes all such considerations out of our hands.

In the meantime, I’ll keep writing, and looking forward to posting here, hopefully for your amusement.  Happy Hanukkah next week for those who celebrate it, and a happy time in general for everyone else.

TTFN

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Fortune brings in some blogs that are not steered.

Hello, everyone!

First of all, I’d like to wish a very Happy Thanksgiving to all those living in the United States.  I hope you have a wonderful day, enjoy a feast with friends and family, perhaps watching some decent football games, and doing any and all other good stuff such as will make you feel thankful.

I wasn’t sure I was going to write anything today; I often skip these posts on holidays, as you may have noticed.  However, such a fortuitous and unexpected thing happened to me today that I simply had to share it.  Talk about being thankful!

I was fiddling around with an older email account, one that I’ve had for many years.  It may even be my very first personal (as opposed to work-related) email, I’m not sure.  Anyway, I used one of its functions to look through the list of all the files that had ever been attached to my emails.  I was, specifically, searching for an old Harry Potter fanfic of mine that I liked quite a bit, but which I’d lost (I wrote part of another at the same time, and I still have that, so it’s doubly frustrating not being able to find the other).  It’s a silly story, to be honest, one that I never even had the nerve to submit to a fanfiction site, but I really would like to be able to find it and read it again.

Well…I haven’t found it.  I’m not giving up, but my Bayesian estimated prior probability of ever locating it is small indeed.

So, why am I thankful?  I’ll tell you.

Some of you longer-term readers may recall me mentioning an old short story I once wrote, and that I had more than half a mind to try to rewrite.  This short story was called Solitaire.  Well, I did NOT find my lost Harry Potter fanfic (title: Disinhibition), but I DID find an older-style Microsoft Word copy of the short story Solitaire!  It’s the complete story!  As written, if memory serves, way back in the early nineteen nineties, or perhaps even the late eighties!

I wrote the story during the summer, when I was visiting the young woman who would later become my wife.  I don’t think we were officially dating then, but if we were, we had just started…it was right after she graduated from university.  In fact, it may have been that summer when we first got involved.

Anyway, she had a summer job with Squibb, if I remember correctly, and was working on a project that was going to keep her up all night.  I’ve always been a night owl, and she worked better with my company (according to her), so I stayed up with her.  I had a spiral-bound notebook with me, probably from my own college stuff, and I decided, while she worked, to write a story.

Solitaire was that story.  I wrote the whole thing that night, almost in its finished form.  It didn’t need much editing.  When she read it, her response was along the lines of, “It’s really good…but what in the world was going through your mind to make you write something like this?”  To that I had no clear answer then, and I have no clear answer now.  It’s just the way my mind seems to work.

I never tried to get it published because, frankly, I couldn’t see what kind of publication would want to release such a dark story.  Now, though, I have just the venue, and I’m going to put it out for Kindle (and will later include it in my eventual next collection of short stories).  It will probably be ready to publish before Penal Colony…which is coming along well, thanks for asking.

I’m obviously even happier than I would have been if I had found the Harry Potter fanfic (though I am still frustrated about that).  In fact, I think the only thing that might make me happier would be if I’d magically found a file containing my complete first horror novel, Vagabond.  Alas, though that was saved as a computer file, I don’t think I ever emailed it to anyone.  If it’s ever published, it will have to have been rewritten.

[This isn’t as heartbreaking as the loss of the first novel I ever completed, back in high school, Ends of the Maelstrom.  Unfortunately, that was 570-some-odd single-spaced, handwritten pages, with much overflow squeezed between lines and into the margins, and I never got the nerve up to begin rewriting it.  My procrastination cost me dearly there, as that book is now lost with all my other worldly possessions from prior to 2011 (see this week’s post in Iterations of Zero for an explanation of why).]

Hopefully I’ll let that be a lesson to me.  Knowing me, though…well, we’ll have to see, I suppose.

But still…wow!  Solitaire, in near-original form, discovered at long last.  Thank goodness for the near-eternal memory of the Internet.  Soon, all of you will have the opportunity, for less than a buck, to read the story that caused the woman I was going to marry to wonder just what the hell was going on in my head.  (She did marry me, so obviously she wasn’t all that worried, though many years later she effectively reversed the decision.)  And, of course, shortly after that, you’ll get to read Penal Colony and In the Shade if you’re so inclined.  And not too much after that, Unanimity will be forthcoming.

You have so much to which to look forward.  I envy you.

TTFN

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O! for a blog of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

Okay, I’ll begin with some exciting news:  Yesterday I finished the first draft of my short story, Penal Colony.  I plan to rewrite/edit PC before finishing In the Shade; I think it’ll be more fun that way, though I reserve the right to change my mind.  Completing Penal Colony first will also lead to a bit more separation between the stories’ publication dates, and I find that more aesthetically pleasing than the alternative.

Yesterday I also completed what was, for me, a traumatic moment in Unanimity.  I say traumatic because some truly terrible things happened to characters who have been in the story nearly since the beginning, and whom I like a lot.  In association with that tragedy, another larger-level horrific event happens, which will in turn galvanize the climax of the novel.  In other words, since things are always darkest before the dawn—at least in conventional narrative—that increasing darkness points toward the story’s resolution.

Which is just a pompous way of saying that I’m getting within sight of the end of the novel, and I’m excited about it.  Of course, after that, the real work begins.

I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned this before, but I know a gifted local young artist, and I’ve preliminarily engaged her to do the cover designs for my next book, Neko/Neneko.  This will be a much more lighthearted tale than Unanimity, and it will also be much shorter.  I’m excited about this artist’s work; I can barely wait to see it, so I’ve already given her the rough idea of the plot, and some thoughts of what I’d like the cover to be, but I also encouraged her to brainstorm ideas of her own.  I’ll be deeply happy if I’m able to get her some public exposure that boosts her career.  She’s not a big computer/internet person, and she doesn’t promote herself.  She’s “officially” an amateur, in that she doesn’t get paid for her work but merely does it for her own pleasure and fulfillment.  At least, she was an “amateur” until I commissioned her to do work, and I’ve already paid her a bit, which is another happy thing for me.

More tangentially:  I’m seriously considering doing a second edition of Mark Red, and probably Welcome to Paradox City as well.  I’m just not quite satisfied with their current forms, and I want to make them better.  I mean to publish each of the stories in WtPC as “Kindle Singles” anyway, and I’d revise/reedit them before release, so I might as well go whole hog.  (I’ll also add my author’s notes to the books in their second additions).

In other news, I’ve almost come to the decision just to stop producing “My heroes have always been villains.”  I get few responses to these entries, relative to my other posts, even though I enjoy them very much, which becomes a bit disheartening over time.  Maybe I’m just not finding my target audience.  The love of villains—as characters and essential plot drivers, not in real life—may be more niche than I thought it was.  I would have expected that most lovers of good fantastic literature would consider a great villain essential to any adventure, and well worthy of discussion.  Maybe they do, but I just write about them in a boring way.  Or maybe I need to promote those posts in the right venues.

This leads to a personal conundrum (one that my beloved villains would not share):  It’s very hard for me to develop the functional narcissism necessary to promote my posts (and other writings) as aggressively as would probably be optimal.  For instance, I think may of my Iterations of Zero essays would get a lot of interaction and feedback if I posted them on certain Facebook pages that deal with the various subjects they address, but I feel awkward about posting them, fearing that I’ll come across as an egotistical asshole.  The peculiar thing is, I’d feel far less awkward about thus promoting someone else’s writing.

It’s a strange mind I inhabit, and I’m not sure the best way to use it optimally, despite having been its nominal pilot for almost half a century.

Well, one good principle is not to give up, so I’m certainly not going to stop writing, probably not until I die.  But I may end “My heroes have always been villains,” not as a matter of giving up, but simply to allocate my resources better—time being the most strictly limited resource.  If any of you want to argue me out of that decision…well, I’m always open to persuasion, as a matter of principle.

For now, as Forrest Gump would put it, that’s all I have to say about that.  I wish you all well.  Next Thursday is Thanksgiving here in America, so I may or may not produce a blog post.  In case I don’t, I hope those of you who celebrate have a truly happy day.  I hope you get together with your families and have a wonderful, gargantuan feast.

If possible, send a little thought for food my way when you do.

TTFN

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Since brevity is the soul of wit and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will blog brief

Good morning, all!  It’s the first day of November, and the day after Halloween (funny how often it seems to work out like that).  I hope those of you who celebrated had an enjoyable time yesterday making light of the dark things by pretending to be them, and laughing, and having some candy and other treats.  Halloween is my favorite holiday, and I dressed up for work (as a dark cowboy…sort of an amalgam of the Man in Black and the Gunslinger from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower), but I really didn’t do anything else to celebrate.  I got home too late—and was too darn tired—to participate in giving out candy to trick-or-treaters, so I basically just laid around in the evening, trying and failing to get a good night’s sleep.

My writing goes well, though more slowly than I would prefer.  Unanimity approaches one of its most terrible moments, after which events will come truly to a head, and the conclusion will be rendered.  It won’t be a happy ending, I’m afraid, but the “bad guy” will be defeated, and the surviving good people will do their best to get on with their lives.  This is often the best for which we can hope, whether in real life or in stories.  Very few characters—real or imaginary—have the option of sailing into the West, into the Undying Lands, to find healing.

I’ve thrown a little reference, or whatever one might call it, to my story Hole for a Heart into Unanimity, since some of the characters in the novel happen to pass by the site where that short story took place.  It seems that these tales take place in the same world, or at least very similar ones, and the presence of the malefactor from the short story is felt by, and may even have a slight influence on, those characters in Unanimity who come near it.

Penal Colony is now very nearly finished.  Once it is, I’ll complete In the Shade before going back to rewrite and edit either short story.  And of course, most importantly, Unanimity will continue to its conclusion.  All this is, of course, assuming nothing bad happens to me in the meantime.  We do live, in some senses, in a horror story—potentially, at least—and though for the most part we exist in the times of respite, the shadow still always takes on new forms and grows again.  The trouble with real life is that the horrors are often less easily spotted and recognized for what they are than in books, plays, movies, and the like.  They are often within us more than they are outside, and we become our own Great Old Ones, our own Crawling Chaos.

Maybe that’s part of why we enjoy dressing up on Halloween so much.

While we’re on the subject of darkness and horror, next week is the second Thursday of the new month, and I’m overdue to write a new episode of “My heroes have always been villains.”  I look forward to it, really, and I think I know which villain I’m going to choose, though I may change my mind.  In any case, those of you who are interested—if such people exist—can also look forward to it.  This is, again, all and always assuming that some dark force or entity hasn’t swallowed me up whole between now and then.  We can only wait and see.

With that, short though it’s been, the time is gone, and the song is over…though in my case, today, I didn’t honestly think I had more to say.  I offer you all my condolences in facing the inevitable and abrupt onslaught of Christmas carols, decorations, shopping, and the like which will begin to rear their heads by today, if they haven’t so reared already.  Don’t get me wrong, Christmas, Hanukkah, Saturnalia, the Winter Solstice…these things are fine and fun, but the concept creep, and the time creep, of the promotional lead-in has gotten slightly out of hand.  I hope you find joy in it, no matter how overpowering or overdone it gets.

TTFN

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Come what come may, time and the hour blogs through the roughest day.

Well, Thursday has caught me off-guard again.  This really shouldn’t happen, considering that it comes every week at the same time—like clockwork, or at least like calendar-work—but I guess I’ve got a mental block in that area.  The days do all seem much the same, with very little that stands out from its surroundings; certainly, there exist plain few inherently exciting events.  Goodness knows the news cycle is too depressingly idiotic to vouchsafe much attention without losing IQ points each time; it’s probably worse for your brain than sniffing glue, though I’ve never tried the latter, and I don’t intend to do so.  If glue-sniffing is worse than paying attention to popular and social media—well, then it is very bad indeed.

Of course, there are exciting things coming in my personal future.  The writing of Unanimity proceeds well, with the story arcing gracefully (I hope) toward its climax, but it continues to be longer than I expect.  I’m pretty sure the first draft is going to be over half a million words before it’s through!  But I do expect it to be complete before the end of the year, and then rewriting/editing can begin, leading ultimately, in the fullness of time, to the release of the novel.  So that’s fun.

I also finished rewriting the original portion of In the Shade, that short story I pulled out and decided to complete.  I am not, however, going to finish writing the story until after I’ve completed at least the first draft of Penal Colony, which is going more quickly now that I’m not splitting my secondary writing time between it and In the Shade.  I expect that both short stories will be complete, rewritten/edited, and released well before Unanimity is ready to go.

I have a tentative plan to put together a new collection of short stories before long, since I write them with some frequency, and release them as the equivalent of “Kindle Singles.”  I know there are people out there who prefer to read physical, paper-and-ink books, and sympathize strongly with that point of view (though I do love being able to carry my library around in my pocket).  Since publishing even my short stories (which tend to be long) in paperback individually just makes for a product that’s probably too expensive for what you get, I like the idea of releasing a new collection of stories, like Welcome to Paradox City, but with more stories than that collection.  I’ve even started playing around with title ideas, like Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, or something along those lines.

And just now, literally, as I wrote this, it occurred to me that—going in the other direction—I could also publish the individual short stories from Welcome to Paradox City as Kindle additions.  These would be The Death Sentence, If the Spirit Moves You, and of course the titular Paradox City.  Interesting.

Of course, if I release these as individual works, it might be tempting to produce audio versions of the stories, which could be fun and rewarding, but which could reinstantiate the trap in which I use a lot of my spare time recording and editing.  I really need to find a way to dedicate more of myself to writing, and its associated pursuits, in the rapidly diminishing (and highly unpredictable) life that remains to me.  Maybe I should set up a Patreon account or something.

Discussing audio leads to an amusing little side-note.  As I think I’ve commented before, I have a longish daily commute, and I like to listen to podcasts and audio books during the trip.  Well, recently, I was fiddling through my phone and found the old, unedited recordings of some of my short stories and the early chapters of The Chasm and the Collision.  I listened to one of these on the way home the other day, and it was quite amusing to hear all my mistakes and retakes, and the inevitable copious profanity that went along with them.  But it was also surprisingly fun simply to listen to myself reading my stories, so last night I opened up the YouTube app on my phone and listened to the first part of Hole for a Heart on my way home.  I don’t know if this is the most narcissistic thing that’s ever been done, but it certainly ranks right up there in my personal experience.  It was, however, honestly enjoyable.  I wonder what, if anything, that says about me, but it’s at least reassuring in that I still find the story to be a good one, and it makes me want to write more.

I just wish I could finish Unanimity more quickly.  Sometimes I think I’m never going to live to see it published, or even to see the finished first draft.  Probably that’s too melodramatic—I do tend to be a bit dark, but then again, if you read my writing, you know that already.

And that’s pretty much it for today, on this surprisingly unexpected Thursday.  I hope I haven’t shortchanged you, but then again, if you enjoy my writing, there’s plenty of it available commercially.

TTFN!

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They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time blogs many parts

Well, you wouldn’t think it would catch me by surprise—it’s something that happens every month, after all, in an entirely predictable fashion—but I didn’t realize until this morning that today was the second Thursday of October and is thus the “official” day for me to write an episode of “My heroes have always been villains.”  Obviously, since I wasn’t thinking about it, I haven’t given a second’s thought to what villain I should discuss today.  Rather than pick a random baddie from my memory’s hat and produce an off-the-cuff essay on him or her, I’ll push that project back until next week or next month.  I apologize if anyone out there was looking forward to a new episode today.  Then again, if there are such people, I haven’t heard from them; I’d be quite gratified if you’d make yourself or yourselves known.  I can exculpate myself a bit for my oversight by admitting that I’ve been rather worn down, tired, and slightly ill, this week (see my IoZ entry here for a brief discussion of the nature and effects of my troubles with insomnia), so I’m behind my mental curve.

Even as I wrote that last sentence, I realized that I’ve often made comment in these, my public venues, about being under the weather.  Now, I don’t think that I’m too whiny and hypochondriacal, as a general rule, but I certainly don’t seem to operate at my physical optimum much of the time.  It’s a problem that I need to keep in mind, going forward.

I will say this, in tangential reference to the above issue:  I’m glad that I decided to put my audio productions on indefinite hiatus.  It’s a melancholy gladness, if that’s not a contradiction in terms, because I really do like those audio productions, and if you’re interested you’re welcome to partake of the ones I’ve made, either here, or on my YouTube channel.  But making them requires a lot of mental energy and physical time.  Since putting the audios on pause, I’ve gotten more writing done on Unanimity, and I’ve worked steadily on my two other short stories during the the hours I would have spent recording and editing the audio, leading to an increased total output of about five pages a day versus only three on average (or roughly 2500 words versus 1500) before.  This is a serious improvement.

It would be nice to be able to do all this full-time, instead of in the interstices between actions of daily necessity required to put food on the table, so to speak.  Then I could write just as much and still make my audio files, which would be a lot of fun.  I hope someday to reach that state, but I obviously haven’t done it yet.

Unanimity goes well, though, and is honestly approaching its climax and resolution (I swear!  No, really!).  I still expect—if I work on it as steadily as I ought—its first draft to be finished before the end of the year, and probably well before that long novel is ready to be published, I’ll release one or both of the short stories I’m working on, Penal Colony and In the Shade.

It’s amazing how something can take so many hours, so much effort, and yet yield a product that can be consumed within the course of, say, a few days for a novel, or at most an hour or two for a short story.  It would be nice if I could give the readers of my work as much lasting entertainment as I get durable engagement from producing them, but I guess that’s the nature of all creative arts.  Even a small, independent film is created through untold hours of effort by astonishing numbers of people, to be then enjoyed within the space of two hours.  A great painting or sculpture can take perhaps less total work, but is then enjoyed in mere tiny, minutes-long chunks by even the most passionate enthusiasts of the arts.

I wonder how many people would have to read my books to make the “man-hours” of reading surpass the man-hours of production; it’s a hurdle I’d love to cross with all my stories.  I don’t know if anyone’s done the math on such a question—I assume that the numbers would be different for different people and different works—but if they have, I’d love to know about it.  I’m sure that Stephen King, for instance, passed that milestone decades ago.  He probably passed it with Carrie, and I doubt that he’s ever caught up in the time since, despite the staggering pace at which he writes.  To match such an outcome is a high bar for anyone to set, but as I’ve long said, only those who attempt the impossible can achieve the unbelievable.

And now, I think that will just about do it for today.  I’ll say, tentatively at least, that I’m going to put off the next episode of “My heroes have always been villains” until November, unless I receive any complaints or protests from those who don’t want to wait.

I’ll close with an exhortation—probably preaching to the converted, but there it is—that you all be cautious of falling prey too much, too often, to the easy distractions of videos and memes and other short-attention forms of entertainment.  Keep reading.  Read “real” books, read e-books (they’re just two forms of the same thing), read fiction and nonfiction, read articles and blogs, read poems, read plays, but do keep reading.  Written language is the lifeblood of civilization, and stories are the default mode of human thought (or so it seems).  To read, and to write, are affirmations of and contributions to the health and longevity of the human project and are well worth anyone’s time.

So I am convinced.  I may, perhaps, be biased.

TTFN

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Methought I read a blog cry, “Sleep no more!”

It’s Thursday again, and we’re in the middle of the first week of Autumn (in the Northern hemisphere).  For the next six months, the nights will be longer than the days.  As someone who tends to write about the darker side of possibility, I don’t think that’s so terrible…or it’s terrible in all the best ways.

My writing has been steady but rather slow this week, mainly because I’m struggling badly with insomnia.  I’m not referring here to the Stephen King book by that name (though coincidentally I’m in the middle of rereading it at this very time), but to the chronic, and occasionally incapacitating, sleep disorder.  Over the previous two nights (before last night) I slept for a rough total of three hours; this is, obviously, not adequate, and it has a noticeable impact on my ability to concentrate and to think clearly.

Nevertheless, the writing continues.  Hopefully, when I go back to rewrite and edit, I won’t be dismayed by how horrible my work product from these past few days is; I don’t honestly expect it to stand out as either better or worse than average.  As I’ve said previously, the way I feel when writing something is poorly correlated with how good the writing turns out to be.  Sometimes when I feel lofty and inspired and superhumanly gifted, I produce nothing but great, steaming piles of oozy excrement.  The converse is also occasionally true.  It’s unpredictable.  Thus, we will always need to edit and rewrite.

Today, for the first time in quite a while, I’m riding the train in to work, due to certain vehicles being in the shop and matters of that sort.  It’s nothing to worry about, just routine maintenance, despite an event I obliquely mention below.

It’s curiously nostalgic to be taking the train, and not entirely unpleasant, though it’s far less efficient—time-wise, anyway—than driving.   I’ve been inspired to write at least one story (Prometheus and Chiron) while waiting for a train, and I see many interesting people when using mass transit.  Little of note happens on the Interstate, especially when one rides a vehicle that is fundamentally solo.  One can have occasional exciting, even life-threatening moments on the road, such as one I had three days ago, but they don’t make very good stories.  Not to me, anyway.  I suppose I could throw some details of such an occurrence into the midst of an action scene to add to the realism, drawing from my personal experience of feeling my right leg squeezed against the passenger door of some idiot’s car, which is changing lanes without the driver looking, but it happens quickly and—thanks to the fact that I don’t tend to rattle easily—is rapidly over, with no harm done.

I’m having a peculiarly good time working on three stories at once, as I mentioned in my previous post.  Of course, my primary work right now is still Unanimity, which is grudgingly proceeding toward its conclusion, but I’m enjoying both the writing of my new short story and the rewriting of the older, uncompleted story, In the Shade.  I remember when I wrote it originally, and more or less why I stopped—I just lost steam, I wasn’t inspired by what was happening, and I had other projects awaiting my attention, to which I turned (with good results, I think).  But rewriting it now, I have to say that I’m pleased with what I made then.  I think it could turn out to be quite good, even if it is just a gonzo horror story.  We shall see.

Skipping to a non-sequitur:  I must say, I’ve so far been consistently disappointed by the lack of response and feedback to the “My heroes have always been villains” episodes.  From my point of view—admittedly biased—I would think people would find such posts particularly interesting.  I wonder if my title for the series throws people off, making them wonder just what kind of horrible person I am, but it’s honestly just an ironic play on the title of an old Willie Nelson song, “My heroes have always been cowboys.”  I don’t actually idolize villains, in the sense of wanting to be like them, though they tend to have character traits that, in the right place, in the right amount, would be quite admirable.  That’s just the nature of the tragic character with the tragic flaw:  Much of what makes a villain a villain would, in proper measure and in the proper circumstances, make them admirable and even heroic.

Likewise, many attributes we admire in our heroes, real and imaginary, can be terrible drawbacks in the wrong circumstances or in different proportions.  Harry Potter, for instance, is one of the most admirable, inspiring, and pure-hearted heroes in modern literature.  Nevertheless, Professor Snape does occasionally have a point when he decries Harry’s reckless disregard for rules and his difficulty controlling his emotions (though I think he’s completely wrong when he calls Harry arrogant).

Oh, well.  I’ll continue to write those episodes roughly once a month, even if they find no readers other than myself, at least until I work my way through most of my most prominently beloved malefactors.  Hopefully there’s someone else out there who enjoys them, but since I think a writer must write primarily for him or herself, and only secondarily for the outer audience, it will only be a moderately devastating heartbreak if there isn’t.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I’ll continue to write my weekly postings in both of my blogs, and more importantly, I’ll keep writing my fiction.

TTFN

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Life is as tedious as twice-told tale, vexing the dull ear of a drowsy blog.*

Good day, all.  It’s Thursday again, and time for another incarnation of my weekly blog post.  Rejoice!

It’s been a relatively eventful few weeks with respect to my writing.  As stated before, I’ve put the production of the audio chapters of CatC on indefinite hiatus.**  This is partly due to an apparent lack of public interest (if you are a counterexample to that, please let me know).  Mainly, however, it’s due to a combination of factors within me and my life.  Specifically, the production of the audio takes a lot of my spare time and mental energy, and without any obvious feedback, I’d rather put those resources into doing what I love most:  writing new things. Continue reading →

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I’ll blog to thee in silence.

It’s Thursday again, and time for another of my weekly blog posts about my writing.

There’s not much new to discuss today, but there are a few updates for the imaginary reader who cares about such things.  First, I think I’m going to take at least a temporary break from doing the audio for The Chasm and the Collision.  I had been toying with that possibility for a while but had decided (yesterday) just to go ahead and do the next chapter.  When I had finished the initial recording of the first portion of Chapter 10, though, I discovered that some technical problem had occurred during the recording.  I don’t know exactly what caused it, but the playback sounded echoey and tinny, with uneven volume.  I didn’t deviate in any obvious way from what I’ve done for the past two or three chapters (which were recorded by a different method from preceding chapters and audio stories), and I don’t see any way to salvage the recording and make it pleasant for the listener.

I’m not someone who thinks that the universe sends messages or omens to people in the real world, even though I write stories about the fantastical and the “supernatural,” but I nevertheless took this as a cue—accidental though it was—to take a break.

It’s not as though I think a lot of people have been listening to those stories or chapters, in any case.  I haven’t received a single comment or any other feedback, either here on the blog or on any of the YouTube versions of the audio stories, so I doubt that a hiatus is going to bring heartbreak to any human.  And I sincerely doubt that any non-human is listening to the stories or is capable of responding to them, so leaving the audio aside should obey the dictates of the Hippocratic Oath and do no harm.

I took two days off from writing this weekend, not for any deliberate reason, but the holiday here in America (Labor Day) contributed.  The occurrence of a tropical storm (mild for South Florida, but still rainy and dreary for a long stretch of time), also dampened my enthusiasm.  I guess, technically, I took three days off, now that I think about it, because I wrote the first draft of my latest post on Iterations of Zero last week, in response to something that I had seen.  I just did the editing and rewriting on Tuesday morning, after which I carried out the recording debacle described above.

Then, yesterday, I wrote again on Unanimity, which was productive.  I’m lucky enough to enter easily into a state of “flow” when I’m writing, especially when writing fiction, so even when I’m gloomy or tired, I’m at least able to produce something.  Whether that product is good or not is probably highly debatable, but the audience of one that consists of me at least always finds it tolerable so far.  So that’s good.

On a tangentially related matter, I recently started a trial of “promote mode” on Twitter, but I think I’m going to discontinue it.  The idea was to try to get word about my books and audio and podcasts out to a greater number of people through that venue, but unfortunately promote mode is not discriminating.  It “promotes” every tweet one twits, so one encounters such bizarre phenomena as when a tweet expressing a feeling of profound depression and discouragement becomes my most “liked” and “retweeted” post since I’ve been on the site.  That’s not the boost I’m looking for.  Also, to my surprise and disappointment, my number of followers on Twitter has dropped since I began the trial; I’m getting a net negative return on a not-insignificant investment.  It may be that I should give the experiment more time, but it’s not as though I have money and Twitter followers to burn.  I think I should probably just let things proceed and grow—if they in fact do—organically.

And with that, there’s not much else to say today.  My wittiness, limited at the best of times, is in the lower reaches of its curve, so I’ll wait for an upward swerve before trying to put out anything more entertaining.  I do hope you’re all well, and continue to be so, and if anything, that you get ever better over time.

TTFN

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So is my blog, Octavius, and for that I do appoint it store of provender.

Guten tag!  Today is the last Thursday of August in 2018, a day that will never come again (unless it turns out that time is recurrent and the universe is closed in the fourth dimension, which I suppose is possible).

I hope you’re all well.  I myself am in a better mental state than I have been for the past few weeks, something for which I’m intensely grateful.  I imagine that anyone reading my blogs with the hope of enjoyment is probably also at least mildly grateful.  Reading something written by a person in a gloomy mood can occasionally be powerful, but it’s rarely much fun.

Speaking of fun, I got an amusing email from Amazon this week.  It’s something that’s happened to me once or twice before, and I might even have written about it here; apologies if I’m being redundant.  Anyway, the message came because, a month or two ago, I ordered a copy of my book Welcome to Paradox City to give to a friend of mine at work.  Of course, Amazon has the very nice feature that, if you buy a product from them, especially a book, they encourage you to rate it and, if you’re so inclined, to review it.  I thus received a request to give feedback about a book that I had written. Continue reading →