Music

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Sleep that knits up the ravell’d blog of care

Hello and good morning.

As those of you who read this blog regularly know, I’ve been ill for almost two weeks now.  I can’t say that I’m fully recovered yet, but‒unfortunately‒I am getting better.  In the early stages of the illness, when I stayed at the house for two of the days of last week, I was at least able to get a bit of extra sleep, thanks to that tendency of the body’s response to illness.  Since then, though, I seem to have rebounded into worse than usual insomnia.  I feel truly horrible, and I also have a persistent cough that’s irritating.

I wonder if there’s anyone out there from my past who truly hates me.  If so, I hope they stumble across this blog, or have already done so, so that they can at least experience a bit of schadenfreude.  It would be nice to think that my pathetic discomfort and self-hatred were at least bringing some joy to the world.  It might be spiteful joy, but I’ll take what I can get.  It’s not as though I’m very good at bringing joy to people I care about and who care about me for very long, at least when they are in regular, close proximity.

My subconscious mind gave me a slight birthday present on Sunday, in that I woke up with a little tune in my head that I’d heard in a dream.  I wasn’t sure if it was something I’ve heard before, but I didn’t and don’t think so.  Anyway, I felt compelled to work out the tune and then put chords to it on Sunday.  Then, Monday morning, I very quickly worked out the guitar melody and chords and did a quick little production of that.  It’s only 16 bars long, so that was easy enough.

I posted the audio here on Monday.  I also made a weird little video with it on my phone; I’ve tried to play with Instagram lately, just because I have a default account since I have a Facebook account.  I posted the combined video there and on YouTube (see below).

I think it was too much of a distraction making my strange introduction and then adding the weird effects.  That was me just playing around with the Clip Champ app from Microsoft, just to see what I could do with it.  But my intro is longer than the song, and I don’t think it adds much.

Anyway, if anyone recognizes the tune from somewhere, please let me know.  If not, I guess this was my personal Yesterday* kind of moment, though my tune is much more banal than Sir Paul’s.  There’s no real shame in that, though.  The vast majority of all songs ever written are not as good as Yesterday.

On a whim, I worked out the tune of another (pre-existing) song on an online keyboard yesterday‒I don’t even recall what song‒but it was interesting that I ended up “singing” it in my head in C Major/A minor.  It wasn’t deliberate, and I only realized it as I finished working out the whole melody.

This was striking because that was the key signature that the above, dream-based song came out in, and in which it is played, above.  However, I know that is not the key in which I originally dreamed it, because as soon as I woke up with it in my head on Sunday, I opened my phone’s voice recorder and tried to sort of hum the tune into it.  I’ll put that recording right here, as evidence (or whatever).

As I knew my voice was hoarse, and I wasn’t sure how well it would come across later (even to me) it wasn’t long before I opened up the online virtual keyboard (it was too early to use the real one) and worked out and wrote down the tune.

Anyway, the point is, between the time I had hummed the tune directly after my dream, which I’m pretty sure was in the key in which I dreamed it, and when I worked it out on the virtual keyboard, I’d taken it from G-sharp major/F minor (which I think is roughly the key in which I hummed it) to C major/A minor.  I don’t know why this happened, but it does make nearly all the black key notes go away.  C major is the simplest, most basic key‒in a sense, anyway‒whereas G-sharp major has its root on a black key.

I’d like to imagine that my subconscious mind corrected it to an easier key signature for me, and that’s not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.  I’ve been playing piano since I was nine (not continuously) and cello since I was ten (ditto), if only at a very flippant and superficial level, never developing any real skill with either instrument (and I do not have perfect pitch in the sense of being able to tell you what note is being played when I hear it, but I can certainly tell if something it out of tune with itself and otherwise deal with relative pitch).  Still, my subconscious might very well have enough imprinted memory of notes and scales to steer me toward easier keys when I’m writing something or sounding out something by ear.

All of this, though, is just a meandering distraction.  I’m not likely to do anything more with my dream-based tune, even if I become more firmly convinced that it’s mine.  I’ve occasionally found myself humming some impromptu lyrics to it in my head, but they are horrifyingly bad and stupid.  Compared to them, McCartney’s first lyrics to Yesterday‒“scambled eggs…dah dah dah dah dah, I love your legs”‒are worthy of Shakespeare or Milton.

So I’m not going to tell anyone what those are.  Anyway, sixteen bars do not a song make, as Yoda might say, so if I were going to turn it into something, I’d need to extrapolate.  That’s not hard to do once you’ve got a basic melody, but it requires you to have the drive to make a song.

I have no such drive for anything, really.  I can barely write this blog, and I am only doing it because I am a creature of habit and routine.  I am thoroughly exhausted by my worsening sleep, and I feel as though I’m experiencing the world through a multi-dimensional haze.  I’m also very depressed and I miss my kids and all the various other people for whom I’ve been too unpleasant for them to want to stay around anymore.

From day to day, and for a very long time, I have been thoroughly alone, and I fear that serves the greater good of the people who matter to me.  Even this week at work, since I’ve been here every day, has been far less successful than the days when I was out of the office.  Everything tends to be better when I’m not around.

I’m not living; I’m just waiting to die.  It’s taking a long frikking time, though, and I’m running out of patience and energy.  But I still can’t seem to sleep.  As the Ramones sang, “I wanna be sedated”.  I wonder if Michael Jackson’s old doctor is making house calls**.

TTFN

*Every Breath You Take had a similar origin.

**Is it too soon to be joking about him?  I have long been personally affronted by the fact that he spent less time in prison than I did.  Then again, he wasn’t in Florida.

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Song from my dream

I had a bit of a “yesterday” moment‒yesterday morning, appropriately enough‒in that I awakened from a sort of dream in which I heard a song or a tune playing, and it seemed familiar and clear, but I wasn’t sure what it was.  When I awakened, I still couldn’t place the tune, but I wanted to check it out and see if I could find out if it was something I had heard before or if my sleeping mind had made it up.

I first tried to sort of hum the tune into the voice recorder, but my voice is still hoarse.  So for the interim I pulled up an online virtual keyboard to work out the notes and write them down, then later, when it was late enough, got to the real keyboard and worked out the chords that went with it.

It’s a short little thing, only 16 bars long, in ¾ time, but I think it sounds kind of nice.  If anyone recognizes it, please let me know.

Thanks.

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O madam, my old blog is cracked, it’s cracked!

“Hello and good morning,” he said with a sigh.

Here I am, doing this again, or still doing it, or however you want to characterize it.  Words cannot give an absolutely complete picture of things that happen, not without being as dense in information as the literal reality itself, and if one is going to do that, one is going to have to double the information density of every real thing in order fully to describe it, which cannot be done at scale.  As I’ve said before, the only thing with computing power adequate to completely simulate the universe IS the universe, at least as far as I can tell.

I had meant to be done with all of this, or at least on my way to being done with all of this, or on my way toward something better or at least different starting on Sunday, the first day of Autumn, Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday.  Unfortunately, I had rather severe problems with my feet‒my left heel/plantar fascia and my right Achilles tendon‒that made it unworkable to carry things out the way I had intended.

I’ve been doing my best to calm these foot problems down, and they both are improving‒being a trained MD with 15 years of clinical experience is good for something* it seems‒but it may just be necessary to choose some other path to my destination.  There are many from which to choose, and I am prepared for several of them.  This is not a new or frivolous idea of which I speak, and I have put thought and preparation into it for a long time, all while foolishly hoping for some answer, some rescue, some epiphany, but ultimately finding such hopes to be chimeras or will-o-the-wisps**…or maybe even balrogs.

Anyway, as you probably already know, I posted all of Extra Body here last week over the course of four days.  If you read and enjoyed it, please take a look at my books on Amazon and consider buying and reading one or more of them.  Though I should warn you, most of my stories are much darker than Extra Body.

If you’re not good with dark stories, may I suggest The Chasm and the Collision?  My sister has rightly pointed out that it’s my only story with as upbeat an ending as Extra Body.  I would say Son of Man and Mark Red are somewhere in between, and a few of my stories, like If the Spirit Moves You (found in Welcome to Paradox City) and, to a lesser extent, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords” have some lightness to them.  The former could even be called a comedy of sorts.  But both stories center around fairly dark concepts or situations.  Many of my other stories are horror stories…though there’s not a single “supernatural” thing in my darkest ever story, Solitaire, which is available solo and also appears in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

Anyway, I doubt very many people will ever read any of my stories, which I think is too bad, but I certainly have no right to have my stories read.  I think there might be a lot of people who might get at least some joy out of some of them, though.  I think it would also be very satisfying to know that many people read my stories and some fraction of them enjoyed them.  Even if they read them without knowing who the author was, I might not mind.  But maybe I would.  I’m not quite so egoless as all that.

Despite that aside, I have not started writing anything new since publishing Extra Body.  I did open up and look at Outlaw’s Mind and I remade a version of it with the whole first in media res scene taken out, since the story ended up going in directions that I think were better than that original idea.  But I have no will to work more on it.  Likewise, when I even contemplate working on HELIOS, I feel an almost visceral revulsion or intimidation.  And roughly the same thing applies for DFandD, or any of my other potential stories, like Changeling in a Shadow World and Orion Rising and so on.

The various drawing materials I bought upon being briefly inspired by Facebook “reels” of people drawing have laid fallow since I got them.  I can’t imagine drawing something now.  Nor can I really focus enough to read books or watch lectures on serious treatments of General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics, though I dabble here and there throughout most days.

I did read a new book:  Annihilation.  I had seen the movie, starring (a thoroughly misused) Natalie Portman, and wasn’t very impressed.  But then I stumbled across a video page by a young woman who is a Star Wars fan and an author and who said she had loved the book but then had seen and hated the movie, so I got the book (for Kindle).  It was hypnotic and disturbing and bizarre, and definitely far better than the movie.

Unfortunately, it’s told in first person, and when I read first person books I tend to lose a bit of my own sense of self and start thinking with the narrator’s thoughts, even about my real life, at least for a time.  It’s the closest I come, in a way, to having a real “theory of mind” in the ordinary sense.  Otherwise, I don’t tend to have a concept in my mind of what other people might be thinking or doing or feeling when I’m not in their presence.  I think reading fiction from a young age helped save me from being utterly confused by humans in general.

People are observable phenomena, and can be fascinating and fun and engaging, and I like less than half of them half as well as they deserve.  But other than through their own words, or through fiction, I don’t really have an “image”*** of other people’s thoughts or minds.  I’ve never even for a moment wanted to be someone else (though pretending to be‒i.e., acting‒can be enjoyable), because I can’t really imagine what it would be like to be someone else‒not from a subjective point of view, anyway.

I have been playing guitar and singing a bit in the mornings at the office some days, when I know I am by myself and can feel relatively uninhibited.  That’s sometimes enjoyable and sometimes painful (though in a strangely addictive way), and I occasionally think about making a video like some I’ve made previously, of me playing and singing Nothing Compares 2U, or Fake Plastic Trees, or Lucky, or The Man Who Sold the World, or even Karma Police or Ashes to Ashes or Weird Fishes (though I can’t so far do the “arpeggi” part of that latter song), all of which I can play and sing reasonably well.  But the thought of doing the work is too intimidating, and anyway, I can’t really bear the notion of putting my disgusting face out there for people to see.

Okay, well, that was a meandering bit of nonsense.  Unfortunately, here I am, still here, alive and writing this blog‒if nothing else for the moment.  I hope something will change about all that, and soon.  I cannot continue as I am, but I cannot see any better path other then no path at all.  Still, of all things, writing this blog is probably the most ego-syntonic thing I do, and I greatly appreciate everyone who reads and likes and “likes” it, even if I cannot comprehend why you do.  Just, thank you.  I surely cannot thank you as much as you deserve.

TTFN

*Though, like everything else about me, it turned out not to be good for very much for very long.

**Or should that be “wills-o-the-wisp”?

***Not really the right term.  Perhaps “model” might be better?

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There would have been a time for such a blog

Hello and good morning.  Yeah, it’s Thursday, so here’s another edition of my now-again-weekly blog.

I actually wrote a little post on my phone at some point in between, while I was in transit last week, because something happened that frustrated me with the irrational things people do.  I haven’t looked at it again, and I certainly haven’t posted it.  Probably I never will.

I sometimes miss writing my near-daily blog posts.  They were a way for me to keep in somewhat frequent contact with people in the human world (or at least to allow the potential for people to be aware of my existence).  But I cannot muster the mental energy both to write/edit fiction and to write a blog while still working.

Actually, this last weekend, for various reasons, I had a three-day weekend for the first time in I don’t know how long—maybe as long as eight years or so, and I’m not being hyperbolic*.  Despite having that time off, I didn’t really do anything.  It basically rained the entire weekend down by me, and it was thoroughly sloppy and disgusting out, but it’s not as though I had anywhere to go even if the weather had been lovely.

Such is my life, if you can call it that:  Go to work Monday through Friday and every other Saturday, commuting quite a long way (which allows me to write while commuting, at least) and then, when off, basically just collapse on my cheap futon on the floor of my one-room dwelling and watch semi-random YouTube videos (and occasional shows on Amazon or Netflix or Hulu or whatnot).

I have, at least, been working on editing Extra Body; I’m almost finished with the third run-through.  I think I’ve done quite a lot of cutting of digressional stuff this time through, which is almost certainly good for the story.  My general practice is/has been to edit my stuff seven times—more if I haven’t been able to cut back to my word number goal—before being willing to publish.  It takes a long time, of course, though it would probably be faster if I had more mental energy and motivation.

It certainly took a long time to edit Unanimity, which was significantly over half a million words long in first draft.  That’s my personal version of what happened with The Stand  and The Lord of the Rings:  I wrote a book too long to be publishable as a single volume because it couldn’t be printed that way.

I’ve still been practicing a little bit of guitar more days than not, I guess; I even played a little bit over the weekend.  I guess I must be getting better to some degree, because a few things that used to be quite difficult for me are not nearly so hard, and I find that I can easily substitute a different version of a particular chord if I don’t like the way it’s been suggested by a given source of tabs and chords.

I guess that’s good, though I don’t know what good it actually does, even for me.  I’m way too self-conscious to play for anyone else, and I certainly haven’t tried to write any new music in a long time.  I have a few little notepad entries with lyrics I’ve come up with here and there, but they’re all just shit, so I don’t feel any desire to work on them further.  Nor do I have any urge to turn either Mercury Lamp or Come Back Again into finished, “produced” works and publish them for any streaming sources or anything.

That’s about it.  I’m basically running on fumes, as people used to say**, and I expect—and kind of hope—to run completely out of gas very soon, one way or another.  I’m actually pretty irritated by my endurance so far.  If there’s no potential light at the end of my tunnel, as there doesn’t seem to be, I wish I would just crash and burn.  I don’t want to have any kind of metaphorical multi-vehicle crash, in which any other people’s lives get ruined in the process of me self-destructing.  That would be rude.  Although, I suppose, if I could somehow manage to arrange it so that I took some true villain, or some significant instance of villainy*** with me, it might be worth it.

Anyway, that’s enough for this week.  I spaced out for a good five minutes just now, which seems to indicate that I don’t have much more to think for the moment, let alone to say.  The weather is horribly muggy here, and I’m sweating just from typing while sitting still, which really shouldn’t generate all that much heat.

I hope you all had a decent holiday weekend (those who actually observed Labor Day, of course).  I hope you’re having a decent beginning of September, which is the current month.  It includes a few important birthdays to me, and of course, Autumn begins in September (in the Northern hemisphere).  But there’s no real Autumn in south Florida, anyway, so that’s just a tease.

Oh, well, to hell with it.

TTFN

*Neither am I being spherical or toroidal; I’m pretty much being strictly Euclidean as far as I can tell.

**Of course, it’s only the vapor of gasoline that ever ignites to provide impetus in the internal combustion engine, but the gasoline is stored as a liquid, at least.

***In my judgement, anyway.  I certainly can’t use anyone else’s judgement, after all, and frankly, I wouldn’t want to do so if I could.

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There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the blog.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, so you know the drill:  it’s time for my weekly blog post.

I don’t know what I’m going to write about today.  I don’t have much to say, or if I do, I don’t know what it might be.  I’ve gotten out of practice writing about nothing—or beginning to write about nothing and waiting to see what happens—since I stopped writing near-daily blog posts.  Right now I just feel blank and empty…and nonspecifically angry.

Of course, I’ve been editing Extra Body, and I’m doing a decent job of trimming it down.  I feel that I’m getting more ruthless about removing passages of digression about tangential things in my descriptions and expositions.  Having written the story on the laptop computer, it was only too easy for me to write and write and write a lot, very fast, of whatever came into my mind.

I guess that’s okay, as long as one is careful then to pare away the extraneous after one is done.  It’s analogous to sculpture, I suppose.  One can start with a huge, bulbous lump of clay and make the general shape however involved as one wants, but to get down to final form, one needs to remove the stuff that doesn’t match the vision, even if that vision isn’t necessarily very clear when one begins.

Not that I’m a sculptor.  I did love to play with modeling clay when I was young, though.  I used to get multicolored packs of it and almost immediately mix the colors together, because I knew it was going to happen anyway.  I never had any desire to make something out of clay that had different hues in different parts.

It was interesting to meld and squeeze various different colors together, seeing them form ribbons of shades that got finer and more interdigitated as I folded and  refolded the clay, the fat stripes of various colors turning to thinner, more finely and multi-layered stripes, eventually turning into a sort of purply-gray-brown uniformity.

I thus learned an intuitive notion of the second law of thermodynamics early in life.  There was never any inkling of the possibility of unmixing the colors of modeling clay.  After two colors came into even momentary significant contact, it wasn’t possibly to separate them completely.  And after one interfolding, there was no point to try to keep anything separate.

That never bothered me.  I liked the shade it became, and I liked not having to worry about trying to separate colors.  The shape and feel of the clay, and the squeezing and molding it into various shapes, was enjoyable.

It would probably be useful to let students of topology play with modeling clay, or perhaps with Silly Putty™, just to give them a proprioceptive insight into the deformation of shapes and surfaces and the nature of holes and the like.  You can really get why a donut and a coffee mug are the same shape topologically if you literally start with one and mold it into the other without making any new holes or eliminating preexisting ones.

Maybe it wouldn’t be very useful.  Still, Einstein (so I’ve read) enjoyed playing with blocks when he was young.  He apparently thought that experience influenced his physical intuition; and there have been few physicists with better or more fruitful intuitions about how physics will tend to behave.

That’s enough of that tangent.

Again, I’m about midway through my third edit of Extra Body, and I’m definitely finding that it improves with less digression.  I don’t know if anyone else will agree, but it’s not as though I have some huge audience to whom to cater; audience capture is not my problem, and I’m not sure if it ever would be.  Maybe I should start a political and social and scientific commentary thing on Substack.  And maybe I should make beans into peas*.

I’ve been diddling around on the guitar on and off on most work mornings, but I can’t really play when I’m back at the house, because I’m not really alone there, so I feel too self-conscious.  At the office, early in the morning, I can play and sing and not have to worry about anyone listening or responding.  I’m my own harshest critic, but at least when I’m alone I can express myself.

It’s a weird conundrum, because on the one hand, on the rare occasions when people have enjoyed my singing or playing or writing or academic work or anything else in my life, it’s been tremendously moving and gratifying; even the thought of someone accidentally hearing me playing and saying they think it’s really nice can bring tears to my eyes.  But I don’t really think anything I do is worthy of praise.  I can’t feel proud of something unless it’s literally perfect.

It’s pretty remarkable that I released the songs I did over recent years, given that they are not perfect, since they were produced in very inauspicious circumstances**.  But I think a lot of that was just me seeing, for my own sake, if I could actually do it.  Then I did, and I was, like, “Okay.  I can do that.  That’s that done.”

It’s like in medical school, when I got honors in my first two classes and then I was kind of, “Okay, I can do that, I guess; point proven to myself.”  And after that I didn’t feel motivated to get the top marks in the class or anything, so I didn’t (except on epidemiology and statistics, which felt too gripping and too important not to squeeze as much as I could out of it).

I suppose if I had stumbled upon a significant number of people who really liked my music/my songs and said so, I might’ve felt more impetus to do more, and to do better versions, but who knows?  Anyway, that’s not how such things tend to happen.

I also recently got briefly captivated by Facebook reels related to drawing and painting, and I bought several kinds of pencils and pens and stuff, hoping or imagining that I would start drawing again, but apart from a little doodle or two, it’s not really going anywhere.

I decided to try to play the Radiohead song Reckoner after I rewatched the “from the basement” video and realized that the guitar in that song was entirely played by Thom Yorke (while singing) and everyone else pretty much did various rhythm parts.  I turned to the song chords in my Radiohead guitar chord book and realized that they were straightforward chords (C, E minor, D, A, that sort of thing) but played high up the neck in unusual locations, finger-picked***.

However, I discovered that my low E-string is apparently getting long in the tooth, and the note on the 12th fret—which ought to be an E one octave higher than the open string—is very different than it should be.  It sounded horrible!  So, I ended up just playing and singing the song using more ordinary, “first position” chords, but it wasn’t as satisfying.  Still, it’s good falsetto practice.  I suppose I could just change the E-string, but that involves more “executive function” than I have to spare, especially on a Strat****.

That’s about all that I have to talk about.  I’ll close by noting that the Tri-rail is running late this morning.  Almost every day it runs late at least at some point.  The announcements say, “Train blah-blah is running late however many minutes…stand by for more information”, but there never is any more information.

The whole thing should probably be burned down and started over—as should the entire world.  Actually, maybe leave off the “started over” part.  Just burn everything and let the ashes cool into the microwave background that will eventually become the long radio wave background.  It’s not as though there’s any point to anything.

This blog post has also gone on too long.  Heck, the blog itself has gone on too long.  Everything about me has gone on too long.  So I’ll let you go for today.

TTFN

*That’s a reference from the movie Time Bandits.

**That fact may have given me an escape clause from the rule of perfection.

***On a lovely Gibson SG in his case.

****You have to take the back panel off and such, and it’s a pain.

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Very brief report

I did write a bit of fiction this morning — 783 words to be exact and precise.  I wish it were a prime number, but it’s divisible by 3 and 9 at least, since the digits add to 18.  Oh, well, it can’t always work out.

I’m feeling quite unwell; yesterday I left the office early (not by much) and yet I still didn’t get any good sleep.  But I’ve felt queasy and weak and just kind of under the weather for the last 18 hours or more.  So, I didn’t really have the energy to write more.  I did play a little guitar and sang some this morning, but it was sub-par, probably because of feeling poorly.

I am scheduled to work tomorrow, though, so maybe I’ll feel a little better then and will write some more.  I guess we’ll see.  Have a good day.

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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.

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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.

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Writing Update for Wednesday, April 17, 2024

Once again, I wrote just shy of 1800 words (1795 unless my figuring is off) on Extra Body today.  Nothing on HELIOS, but I had no real intention to go far on that until Extra Body is done.

I did no real exercise between yesterday and today, but I did play a little guitar yesterday and today in the morning. “Play” is the right word, because it was not very serious, and I’m rather rusty and my hands are a bit stiff.  Still, it’s somewhat fun.  I need some new picks, though.

Anyway, further bulletins as events warrant, and of course, I plan to write my traditional blog post tomorrow.  This seems like a good decision, since tomorrow is Thursday, and it would be odd to write a Thursday blog post on some other day of the week.

Have a nice day if you are able.

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Not A Blog Post…

…it’s just a quick update/bit of bragging.  I wrote about 1600 words this morning on Extra Body, and then I even played a bit of guitar for about half an hour (and sang with it).  I’m extremely rusty, particularly the singing, but it’s nice that some things come back seeming easier than they did the last time I played.  I guess I didn’t lose those learned skills, which is nice.  Writing is always relatively easy, though it’s not as if I’ve ever really stopped doing that.

No posts or updates this weekend unless things change.  I will write fiction on Monday, and if you want, I can leave little updates like this afterwards.