Creative Writing

by

A brief report from Monday morning 5-13-2024

I intended to force myself to write a single page this morning while waiting for and then while on the train.  As often happens, once I got started, the whole thing took care of itself, and I wrote 2,103 words on Extra Body.  I can’t believe how long this story is already getting, though it is drawing to its conclusion fairly soon.  Then will come the editing and paring down and shortening (and other synonyms).

I think I may indeed publish this story in a paperback version in addition to the Kindle version, since it really does qualify as a novella.  Which makes me consider re-publishing some of my longer, old “short stories” as stand-alone novellas.  I have long had the thought that people would be more likely to buy a short-ish story in Kindle format than in a small paperback format (which would, perforce, be more expensive than the e-book version).  However, maybe there are still enough people out there who prefer a physical book to an e-book that I would make more sales that way.

I’d be interested in hearing from you, if you have any thoughts about this.  Please, leave a comment below on my blog page on WordPress if you have input to give.

In other matters, the new tinnitus in my left ear continues, though it waxes and wanes, and the right ear is currently louder.  I got some walking and some biking in this weekend, but it’s been very hot for this early in the year around here–in the mid 90s on Saturday and the low 90s on Sunday–so it really wiped me out.  Still, I remembered at least to put on a little sunblock, so I didn’t get as sunburned as I usually do, if at all.

I hope all you mothers* out there had a good Mother’s Day yesterday.  And I hope all of you have a good week.

*And, no, I don’t mean that as half a word.

by

Both my ears are ringing down the curtain

I’m planning on writing at least a page on Extra Body once I get to the office, but I haven’t left yet, and so I’m starting on a bit of a blog post, which I plan to finish with an update on what I write.  I don’t want to get out the laptop computer and use it at the house before I leave.

I have some unfortunate news‒unfortunate for me, at any rate, though it may not matter much to anyone else.  Yesterday, May 9, 2024 AD, at roughly 3:25 pm Eastern time, I suddenly began to have tinnitus in my left ear, matching what I have had in my right ear since…about 2007, I think.  I have very poor hearing in my right ear as part of that process, and it’s hard to tell what’s going on with my left, so far.  I can only say that it’s quite distressing.  I felt like I wanted to scream in the office yesterday afternoon, when it happened.  I still want to scream.  It’s been going on for just over 13 hours now, and there is no sign of it abating.

I fear this may be the proverbial final straw for me.  I don’t know if I can go on like this.  There are already so few motivations for me to continue living, and so many things that make life unpleasant.  I really don’t know what to do.

It’s slightly interesting that the pitch in my left ear is almost identical to the pitch in my right ear, just perhaps an eighth of a step lower.  I’m not sure what might be behind that fact.  Perhaps that’s the pitch range at which my cochleae are most vulnerable.  I am not really sure how I would find out.

It’s worth noting, though, that there is no internal evidence of any form of “beat” phenomenon such as would happen with real, external sounds that are close in pitch but not exactly the same, as their waveforms go back and forth between constructively and destructively interfering with each other.  This makes sense, of course; they are not real sounds but are neurological phenomena, and are occurring in opposite ears, and are thus initially processed in different sides of my brain.  The “beat” phenomenon in slightly dissonant pitches is a literal, physical, external phenomenon, not a neurological illusion.  This, at least, my current experience is making clear and convincing to me, at least provisionally.  I guess I knew it already, implicitly.  Has anyone else out there had this experience?

Anyway, as I said, if this bilateral tinnitus continues, I don’t know if I can.  It’s one thing after another, or rather, one thing on top of another.  Chronic pain, dysthymia/depression, insomnia, possible ASD, solitude, and now double-tinnitus.  My cup of hemlock runneth over, and maybe it’s time I just quaffed that motherfucker.

I guess I can give this a few days to see if it resolves.  I’m not optimistic.  Since the right ear tinnitus began, in the latter parts of the first decade of this millennium, it has waxed and waned in intensity, but it has not stopped for a moment.  But one instance of a phenomenon does not a pattern make, though my knowledge of the subject from a medical point of view gives me more data, and it’s not comforting.

I’ll take a break writing now, for the moment.  I’ll complete this post later.

***

Okay, well, I wrote 728 words on Extra Body, which was basically one single-spaced page.  I guess that’s good, considering the circumstances.  It’s nice when the office is quiet‒it’s quieter than the house is when no one is here, because at the house, except in deep winter, I have to have the AC and/or fan on or it becomes unreasonably hot.

I still don’t know what I’m going to do, though.  The ringing in both ears is constant, like that high-pitched noise they play that only young people are supposed to be able to hear.  I don’t even want to play guitar or anything, for fear of it interacting.

I guess I’ll see what happens.  I’m off this weekend; maybe the noise will abate.  Or maybe I’ll finally go fully mad, like the Master in response to the drumming sound in his head.  Which reminds me, the new Doctor Who “season” starts tomorrow.  I guess there is that to which to look forward.  I really like Ncuti Gatwa so far, so hopefully it’ll be nice.  I’m off work this weekend; my coworker will be back in the office today.

I hope you all have a good weekend.

by

The great blog itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and even though I’ve been writing blog posts nearly all this week so far—since I haven’t been writing fiction—this is now my more “traditional” blog post for the week.

I apologize for not writing fiction yesterday and the day before.  I’ve been feeling terrible and horrible and no good and very bad and all that other stuff.  My coworker is still out, though he’ll probably be back sometime today, or possibly tomorrow at the latest, and anyway, that’s not the main problem.  The main problem is that I have been just terribly tense and anxious and have had terrible nights’ sleep even for me, despite trying to sedate myself and optimize my bedtime habits and so on.

Last night I got almost six hours of sleep, which for me is quite good, though it doesn’t feel close to enough.  It would be one thing if I slept six hours and awoke feeling refreshed and healthy; then I would know that I had gotten enough sleep, that six hours was just how much sleep my body needed.

Alas, things are not that simple.  My body’s optimal sleep time is probably pretty typical at around eight hours, but that particular “pressure” in the system is countered by whatever the various sources are of tension and stress and pain and depression.  When the sleep need gets too strong, it overpowers those other vectors, but as soon as it dips below some threshold, those other vectors dominate enough to push me into unpleasant wakefulness again.

I can literally remember the last time I got a good night’s sleep; I’ve probably mentioned it here, before.  I don’t know the specific date, but it was in the mid-1990s*.  (I’m being completely serious about this—as serious as a bloodcurdling scream for help.)

Last night, I walked about three-fifths of the way back from the train station in the evening—about three miles.  It was quite warm out, certainly in the high 80s, so I think I sweated a lot.  At least that meant I didn’t need to wake up to use the bathroom!  Also, I was physically fatigued enough to rest, and I’d been careful to try to balance my walking so that my left knee wasn’t acting up, which seems to have worked reasonably well for the time being.

I know that’s all very boring.  I just don’t have anyone else to whom to talk about these things, so I share them with all of you.  Aren’t you lucky?  I guess you can always just skim over the boring stuff.  I’m not sure how it is that we can tell what’s going to be boring before we literally read it, but people do seem able to do that, and it works.  I’ve done it myself.

I apologize for not writing any fiction since Monday morning.  I don’t know if any of you were angry at me for that, but I feel that I owe an apology.  I guess I really owe an apology for being a big annoyance and a downer, but I don’t know what to do to change those things.

I don’t want to be a blind optimist, of course.  I want to understand the world as clearly as I can, as objectively as I can, and as deeply and broadly as I can.  Maybe there’s no way to do that without being tense and depressive.  The universe is, after all, vast beyond intuitive understanding, and the realms at which fundamental physics applies are tiny and intricate, also beyond ready intuitive understanding, and time is old in the past and so much longer in the future than a person with a finite lifespan can truly take on board.

But I don’t think that must be despair-inducing.  I’m much more stressed out by how little humans seem even to contemplate how small they are, both individually and collectively, than I am by my own smallness.  As I learn more about how the world really works at deep levels, I don’t feel frightened or overwhelmed by it, like some Lovecraft protagonist who goes mad when confronted with the Great Old Ones or whatever.  I feel that I have grown larger—not literally, of course, but the phase space in which my mind exists takes more and more of reality into itself, and it’s really quite cool, if that’s the right word.

I think at least one thing that makes me feel despair is that so few other people seem even to want to understand the greater universe in any depth or breadth.  They would much rather imagine that the universe is very small and brief, as long as they are somewhere near the center of it.

But of course, to paraphrase Gandalf, they can shut themselves into their tiny little world, but they cannot shut the universe out.  And this in turn invokes not merely the old saw that nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed (for indeed, one cannot do anything but obey nature).  But I would say, far more strongly, that nature, to be survived—even to have a chance of being survived—must be understood as well as possible.

If you don’t know the rules of chess, you’re unlikely to be able to win a game.  Likewise with any other game, including even simple video games.  But those games have rules that humans invented.  The rules of nature have to be probed and unlocked and discovered, and they are much more fine-grained and large and complex than any human-made game could be.  They must be so, for the entire human world is but a tiny little part of that game, one of the innumerable things it allows to come into being.

Oh, well.  What are you going to do?

I guess you’re going to write a blog about it, and in the meantime, try to learn as much about the world as you can, because it is interesting at many levels.  And, of course, you can write a bit of fiction, to which I’ll try to return tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, I hope the vast majority of you are getting better rest than I have been getting.  I hope you have a very good day.  And I hope you have friends and family with whom to spend your finite and precious time.

TTFN

*I remember waking up feeling absolutely refreshed, and though I was too young to think about feeling “ten years younger”, I did feel more alive than I had in some time, almost as if I’d gotten superpowers**.  I’ve known people who seem almost addicted to sleep, and if that’s how they tend to feel when they’ve slept, I can hardly blame them.

**Speaking of which, I have a stupid, joke superhero idea that I’ve been too embarrassed to share with anyone in person (I’m sure you’ll understand why):  “Bitten by a radioactive wildebeest, Anthony Edward Lopez finds himself with slightly-greater-than-human powers of strength and speed.  Deciding to use his new powers to fight crime, he becomes:  Gnu-man.”

by

Monday report from 5-6-2024

Well, I got a pretty good amount of writing in this morning:  2.,088 words on Extra Body.  It helps when I’m writing conversations; the character just say what they want to say, and the conversation goes on more or less naturally.  I don’t even feel like I’m doing any work, half the time, nor that it’s coming from me.  Actually, writing fiction in general doesn’t ever really feel like it’s anything I’m doing, in a sense.  Whatever part of my brain does it, it’s not really accessible to the conscious portion until it goes down on the page.  I don’t know what I’m going to write until I read it as I write it.

As far as other matters go, I tried to ride my bike some this weekend, after getting a new seat and post that I hoped would sit lower than the other does.  Alas, there’s something in the post hole of the bike that prevents it from going lower.  I guess I could chop off an inch or so of the seat post, but I would need proper equipment to do that, and I don’t have it.  Maybe I’ll get it.

I’m not too unusually stiff and sore from biking, though I realized how out of shape I’ve allowed myself to become.  Also, my left arm and leg are notably fatigued relative to my right, as is the base of my left thumb more sore and stiff than my right.  Somehow when I ride, I put more strain on my left side, including where I’m holding the handlebars.  It’s weird.  If I didn’t know the cause, I might worry that I’d had a stroke.

Anyway, that’s about it for today.  I hope that you all had a good weekend, including a good “Star Wars Day.”  But don’t forget, today is:

revenge of the sixth

by

VERY brief report for Saturday, May 4, 2024

First of all, “May the 4th be with you!”

I wrote a modest amount for me this morning–only 1484 words.  That’s still a credible amount, given that I had set my new goal to be a page a day at least, and this is more than that.  It was actually about two single-spaced pages on MS Word, with Calibri, font size 11.  Not that it matters.

Of course, it’s Star Wars Day, which is a silly play on words, which makes it just my kind of thing.  I hope you all enjoy it.  I’ll probably be watching some people reacting to classic Star Wars movies on YouTube, since I have most of the original and some of the prequels practically memorized.  I used to be able to do the first five or ten minutes of the original movie by heart–mostly C-3PO talking to R2D2, when you get down to it.  “Do you hear that?  They’ve shut down the main reactor!” and so on.  And, of course, a line or so later, Threepio being his traditionally optimistic self saying, “We’re doomed.  There’ll be no escape for the Princess this time.”

Anyway, that’s enough of that for now.  Please have a good day.

may the fourth

by

Brief report for Friday, May 3, 2024

I took a Benadryl to get to sleep last night and it seemed to help a little, though I’m still slightly groggy this morning.  Perhaps that will pass.  In any case, I was able to write on Extra Body this morning, adding 2,044 words to the story.  I could’ve written more, but I was concerned about diminishing returns.  Even Stephen King said he sets his goal at about 2,000 words a day, and he’s one of the most prolific authors this side of Barbara Cartland.  In any case, there will be extensive paring, as I keep saying over and over again, every day.  Sorry to be repetitive.

There’s not much other new.  If the office is open tomorrow, I will be working, and I will write some in the morning.  If not, I will not, and there will be no Saturday report.

I hope you all have a good Friday (but it’s too late for “Good Friday”), and that you have a wonderful weekend.

by

And this weak and idle blog, no more yielding but a dream

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, as I suspect you will already know, so I’m writing my old-style weekly blog post again.

Of course, I’ve been writing little, brief snippet reports on a daily basis to keep you all updated about how my writing is going.  Or, like yesterday, I wrote one to let you know that I didn’t write fiction at all because I got almost no sleep, which is bad even for me.  I just felt awful.

I left work as soon as I was finished getting things set for the payroll and sent out to the company, and I went back to the house and took two diphenhydramine (that’s the generic of Benadryl®).  It did help me sleep a little in the afternoon, and then I woke up and got some food and relaxed a bit before taking another diphenhydramine before lying down for bed.  I don’t know how truly effective my sleep was; the general consensus is that sedated sleep is not a good substitute for natural sleep, but it almost has to be better than essentially no sleep.

I had some odd dreams, or at least I had one odd dream, during the afternoon or night.  This is unusual mainly in that I almost never have any dreams that I remember nowadays.  This one was some manner of nature documentary about ocean-going predators, particularly “killer whales” AKA “Orcas” and—this is a weird part—large, oceangoing crocodiles.

As far as I know, there are no deep-water crocodiles, but the ones featured in my dream seemed more like mosasaurs, anyway.  They were big and vicious, and there was “footage” of them attacking various large creatures in the ocean, but I couldn’t ever recognize the prey of either predator.  Also, there was a voiceover, but I think it was my voice.  Odd.

There was never really any scariness to it, because there were never really any human victims, but it’s a peculiar subject about which to have a dream.  If MLK ever had a dream like that, I don’t think he made a speech about it.

It’s curious enough for me to have a dream that I recall, nowadays, even if the dream is boringly strange (though not, I think, strangely boring).  I hope it means that I got a decent amount of sleep.  Certainly, I feel better this morning than I did yesterday morning, but that’s a very low bar to clear—it’s certainly too low to limbo.  It’s a bit like being more handsome than one of the zombies in Dawn of the Dead (although I’m not sure the latter is literally true of me).

I’ve not written on Extra Body since Tuesday, but that’s okay.  I made pretty good progress on it the previous two writing days.  As I’ve said, it’s basically reached novella length, more or less, as do many, if not most, of my “short stories”.

I don’t seem to have a knack for writing truly short tales.

I think my shortest story is Solitaire, which I wrote in one night, and which is also probably by far the darkest story I’ve ever written.  Really, if any of my works should come with some manner of “trigger warning”, that’s the one.  I was in a good mood when I wrote it—which I did in a spiral-bound, half-sized notebook I had with me.  It was just an idea that popped into my head because, at the time, I tended to play a lot of solitaire (with real cards).  I’m sure I’ve written about all this here before, so I’ll try not to rehash it.

I probably would tend to write shorter stories if I used such notebooks nowadays, but the base of my thumbs really gets sore when I try to write too much by hand.  Anyway, to be fair to me, I wrote Paradox City by hand, after writing both Mark Red and The Chasm and the Collision by hand, and none of those stories are short.  The latter two are novels, and the “short story”, Paradox City, was about sixty pages long, hand-written, if memory serves.  It would arguably count as a novella itself, as would Hole for a Heart, I For One Welcome Our New Computer Overlords, and certainly In the Shade.

I was thinking maybe I should publish this latest story not just in Kindle format—which is what I tend to do with my “short” stories—but also in a small paperback form.  I’m not sure if the price would make it prohibitive, but there’s no real shame in paperback novellas.  Of Mice and Men (about 30,000 words long) was a paperback in the form in which I read it originally (twice in one day) when I was in junior high or my first year of high school.

Also, each “chapter” of The Green Mile was published as an individual paperback when it first came out, and those were shorter than most of my short stories.  Mind you, that was Stephen King, so there was a ready market for the books, and there were no e-books back then, let alone for Steinbeck, so I may be giving poorly chosen examples.

I think I’ve said that I have the notion of writing HELIOS as a sort of serial light novel, in the style of Japanese light novels.  Each volume would be longer than one of my short stories, of course, but I can try to keep them from getting prohibitively long.

Then again, if I’m going to write a series, I’m committing myself to a fairly long time writing the same story.  On the other hand, Mark Red is also supposed to be a series—there are at least two sequels to it in my head.  But no one has expressed any real interest in those, nor really in the first story, to be honest, so I haven’t gotten back to it.

I would love to get some feedback from any of the readers of my blog, especially if they have read any of my books, about what they would do if they were me (other than try to reverse whatever curse had made such a thing happen to them).  Please, leave a comment below.

In other news, I’ve continued to work on the calculus course on Brilliant dot org, which is perhaps not the ideal way to review calculus, but isn’t at all bad, either, now that I’m doing it on my smartphone.  I’m thinking of doing some other courses—maybe some reviews of basic physics, and of course, eventually, linear algebra and differential geometry to prepare me for greater study of GR—because taking more than one course at a time is the way one does things in university.

I haven’t really been reading any other new books for the moment.  As before, I’ve had a hard time getting into any new fiction, which is depressing, but it’s a fact to which I’ve become resigned for the time being.  Maybe if I weren’t working full time, I would find that easier; I don’t know.

If anyone out there wants to buy the movie options for any of my stories, and by doing so give me enough money on which to live for a while so I can write “full time” and so on, I’m open to the possibility!  Ha ha.

Anyway, I think that’s enough for now.  I don’t want to go on and on and on and on like I did last Thursday.  I think that post was too daunting for most readers to bother trying to work all the way through it.  So I’ll leave this post for now, with just a “Happy First Thursday of May of 2024”.  Please try to take good care of yourselves and of those you love.  And try to be charitable, even toward those with whom you have profound disagreements.  Most arguments are ephemeral, and they are almost all about ephemeral things (even if they feel deeply important in the moment), so it’s foolish to sour your days and the culture at large with hostility and vindictiveness.

Maybe I really did get a decent amount of sleep!

TTFN

by

Brief Tuesday Report (4-30-2024)

I didn’t go quite as wild with writing today as I did yesterday, but I still did write another 1,550 words.  My “short story” is already almost 30,000 words long, which is roughly as many words as are in Of Mice and Men, so I guess it counts as a novella.  A lot of my “short stories” turn out that way.  I’m not even sure how long Outlaw’s Mind is, so far, and that was intended to be a short story*.

Of course, as I said, I mean to pare it down quite a bit, but there’s only so much I’ll be able to do, and the story isn’t finished yet.

I also played guitar and sang a little bit.  I don’t know how well my playing is going–my thumbs are still painful.  But my voice is getting into better shape, at least, I can tell that much.  It’s not really worth anything to anyone but me, but it’s still a positive, I guess.

I’ve also recently started taking the Calculus course on Brilliant, since I recently decided to download the app to my phone as something to do in spare time.  I don’t necessarily think it’s a good way for me to study physics, but it’s a good way to review, and then maybe to learn, some mathematics.  It’s good to start with the basics, which I’ve already long since studied, because it feels quite easy, and that’s a nice way to build up.  I mean to work on the linear algebra stuff and further materials, because I’ll need that if I want to really understand General Relativity, so I can truly get why uniform energy in spacetime leads to repulsive gravity.  All the rest of it makes intuitive sense to me, but I need to wrap my head around that clearly and precisely, or I won’t be satisfied.

Anyway, that’s it for today.  I hope you have a good one.

*Chortles of derision are understandable.

by

Monday morning report, 4-29-2024

In case anyone was wondering, the office was closed on Saturday (April 27th, 2024 AD/CE), so I did not work and I did not do any writing this weekend, neither fiction nor nonfiction.  In fact, I did almost nothing productive at all this weekend, apart from a few moderate walks.  I also didn’t really do anything fun this weekend, honestly.  The closest I came to that was watching some YouTube videos of people reacting to movies that I’ve seen before.  It’s almost like watching a movie with a friend.  Not really, though.

Anyway, this morning I did some writing, and I guess I was making up for lost time, because I wrote 2,626 words on Extra Body.  Obviously, it’s coming along, and I hope to be done with it before too long.  At least, I’ll be done with the first draft.  It will need a lot of pruning, of course, because I do tend to get carried away when I’m writing fiction, especially when I’m using my laptop computer, which I did today.

Other than that, there’s not much to add.  I’m starting a new work week today, as are most people, and <sarcasm> that should be wonderful fun </sarcasm>.  It actually wouldn’t be all that bad if there was not so much noise and if people came and went on time and followed the rules and/or the rules were enforced.  Oh, well.  The world is unsatisfactory, and it always has been.  It probably always will be.  I don’t know why I bother with it.  I’m way past finding any significant value in existence.

I hope at least some of you are more enthusiastic about starting your work week than I am.  I don’t know whether to tell you to look forward to my story; it’ll be a while before it’s done, and of course, I don’t know whether it will be something anyone will like.  I guess there’s only one way we can discover that fact.

Have a good day, please.

by

Writing (and other things) report on Friday 4-26-2024

Well, I went a bit more nuts than usual this morning, and between 5 and 7 am I wrote 2230 words on Extra Body*.  It goes to show that severe insomnia at least can be useful in some ways, though it remains horribly miserable and miserably horrible.  Still, at least I’ve made up some ground from being so under the weather physically over the last week.

The story is already — of course — longer than I would have expected it to be, as tends to happen with my stories.  I’ll try to pare it down a lot during the edit, but hopefully people who read it will appreciate that it’s not just a quick and dirty tale, so to speak.  It’s not as though I’m wasting a lot of time in unnecessary details; at least I don’t think I am.

I even got out the guitar and strummed and sang a bit this morning.  Singing is weird, though, because when I sing even banal songs, I often find myself tearing up and fighting not to cry.  It’s weird, and a little disquieting.  It’s not as though I can express my emotions at any other time, and it’s not as though the song necessarily matches the feeling.

Oh, well.  I’m a freak, anyway.  What can you do?

I apologize for the length and oddness of yesterday’s post.  It doesn’t seem to have garnered very many readers, or at least not very many “likes”**.  I can’t really blame anyone; I went a bit nuts with that, as well.

I expect to work tomorrow, barring the unforeseen (as is, of course, always the case with everything), so I’ll probably get some more writing done then, though perhaps not as much as today.  I don’t know about guitar; the bases of my thumbs are still giving me a lot of trouble, and it makes playing rather painful.  Perhaps they feel left out, since so many other joints and skeletal and connective tissue structures act up on me.

Have a good day if you are able.

*I’m thinking I might change the name of the story before I publish it.

**Incidentally, I was surprised to realize recently that my song Like and Share has almost twice as many plays as any of my other songs.  I guess it’s the song that’s most pertinent to the modern age of social media.  It’s still only a bit over 500 plays — I have no idea what the stats are on Spotify or iTunes or TikTok or any other venue — which is NOTHING compared to normal commercial songs or even the songs of serious but amateur musicians, but it’s an interesting statistic to me.