I’m riding on the Greyhound, southbound from Marietta, Ohio back to West Park, Florida, after having been in Ohio due to the death of my father. I was unable to say goodbye to him in person one last time, but at least I was able to say goodbye in a way, and to be there for my Mom, whose birthday followed very shortly after my father’s death.
Monday, October 24th, 2016
Interesting morning so far…in tragic way. I got up a bit later than usual, planning on taking a slightly later train, since I ordinarily arrive far earlier at the office than anyone else. However, while the train was going north, there was an accident (another train hit someone), so they had to reroute the passengers by running shuttles and so forth…and of course there were delays. Most people tend initially to react to such events as if this is something happening to them, but of course, it’s something that already happened to the poor person who died, and to the people who are stuck on the train involved in the accident until the authorities finish their investigation. Continue reading
I meant to write this blog entry last week, but I got distracted and then got a bit ill, so I put it off like a pansy (or some other kind of flower…flowers in general are notorious procrastinators). So now I’m writing it, a bit on the late side, to the massive relief of those who have been anxiously anticipating it (no one).
I wanted to make a few announcements and give a few updates. So I will.
First, there is a collection of blog entries that I had unpublished here, with the idea of starting a separate blog for my political reflections. This blog was then to be kept more or less entirely for my author-related productions. But then I thought, “The name of this blog is robertelessar.com, after all. Not robertelessarauthor.com or robertelessarbutnothingpolitical.com. Why should I try to segregate one part of my being from another? Why should I behave as if, when acting as a writer of fiction, I have no strong political views or axes to grind? Am I to attempt to live a lie? Am I to put forward a façade, to fracture my identity in pieces in order to maintain some ironic pretense at unity? Is it wrong for a writer of fiction also to put forward his views on political matters, even those that have had a profound and sometimes devastating impact upon his own life? NO!! I shall not succumb to that cowardly pressure! I shall present my whole self, in all its parts, to the world, let the chips fall where they may, and other clichés. As Whitman wrote, ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’ Let the multitudes have their say, messy though it may be.”
Also, it’s a pain in the ass to try to maintain two separate blogs.
So, with all that in mind, I am going to be re-publishing my old, politically-oriented blogs, including some that are several years old (there is a long hiatus in my blog entries between, say 2013 and 2015, during which time I was a guest of the Florida Department of Corrections). I may re-release them all at once, or I may get them out in dribs and drabs. There will be little rhyme or reason to my decision in this matter; I’m going to do it as the mood strikes me. I do hope you enjoy them, or at least find them thought-provoking. I encourage comment and discussion on all of my blog posts. I often don’t GET it, but I do encourage it.
Now, on to other matters.
The editing of Mark Red is proceeding apace, but it is laborious and often frustrating. I can certainly tell that I was writing it under far-from-ideal circumstances to which, especially at the beginning, I had not yet adapted. I suppose I should congratulate myself for having done it at all, given that through which I was going (Well done, me, well done), but Oy! In any case, it’s probably going to be a few months, at least, before it’s in any shape to release.
I’m also, as I carry on the above herculean task, writing a new short story. I had to do some new fiction writing, because going so long without producing anything new was making me depressed. It’s a bit of an unusual story, I think, but I like it so far, which is a nice. It’s usually a bad thing if an author doesn’t like his or her story even as he or she is writing it. In any case, I think what I’m going to do once the story is done, and edited, and whatnot (you can’t skip the whatnot) is simply to publish it here, on my blog. I released the fragment of short story “In the Shade,” so why not a whole story?
Regarding the short story fragments: I have some other old bits of uncompleted short fiction lying around, including my beginnings of a Harry Potter fanfic (it’s quite dark…Harry Potter lends itself nicely to dark fanfics in my opinion). I may post some of them here, just for fun. We’ll see.
I also have some old, lost short stories that I think I am going to attempt to rewrite. One of them won an award many years ago, when I was in high school (the NCTE award…only two were given in each state! Well done, me, well done). The other is a very dark short story I wrote during the summer in college one night while keeping my then-girlfriend company as she crammed to complete an assignment for her summer job. It was a pretty good story, though very depressing, and I’ve always regretted that I didn’t do anything with it, and of course that I have lost it along with all my other worldly possessions.
However, I have forgotten almost nothing about those two stories, and recreating them should be more or less simply a matter of scratching and scribbling, scribbling and scratching, so to speak. I shall probably release them, as well, on this page.
Of course, I shall (after finishing the rewrite and release of Mark Red) complete my rewrite and release The Chasm and the Collision. And then I shall return to the very dark sci-fi/fantasy/horror novel, Unanimity, which I forced myself to interrupt in order to complete all of my hitherto uncompleted work.
Well, that’s the update, hope you’ve liked it. Further bulletins will be forthcoming as events warrant.
TTFN!
Okay, I’ve been putting off doing a post, because I kind of thought I wanted to have something profound to say after not having been around here for a while. Then I decided, “What the heck? There’s no need to be so serious.” I want to celebrate being back, and being able to post something, by actually posting something. It’s not as though I haven’t been writing this whole time, in any case. In fact, while I’ve been away, I’ve written two complete novels, gotten most of the way done on a third, and I also wrote a very long “short story”.
Those of you who’ve been paying attention (both of you!) will have noticed that chapters of my books have been published on Amazon for Kindle even while I’ve been away. For this I owe thanks to my amazing and incredibly supportive sister, Liz, who showed breathtaking courage and tenacity by wading through my handwritten–often in cursive!–writing to retype it and publish it to Amazon. But now I’ve been able to take that task off her hands.
Those of you who may not understand just what an undertaking that project was will do well to learn this: Before I started using it, cursive was simply called “script” writing. Only after people began to try to decipher my writing did it come to be known as “curse-ive”…and for good reason.
Okay, maybe that’s a mild exaggeration. But it is only mild.
As for just why I have been away for such a long time…well, there will be more on that to come. Suffice it to say that, like Gandalf, I was delayed because I was held captive. I will be writing about that experience, about the things it has made me realize about the society in which we live, and the things which we so readily and thoughtlessly accept, which we should not, in the near future. I’m sure you can’t wait.
There is going to be a shift in focus on this blog–one might actually say that it will be less focused going forward, in the sense that I am not going to attempt to tailor it narrowly about one particular topic or subject matter, nor even to keep it focused around narrow ranges of material. Of course, I expect that I will continue to write about scientific and medical topics; these are two of the loves of my life, after all, and as the great Carl Sagan pointed out, when you’re in love you want to shout it to the world. But another love of my life is writing fiction, and I am going to be discussing my ongoing fiction writing a fair amount, since it is the single most dominant fact of my life at the present moment.
I have been writing at least a thousand words a day (and usually more) at least six days a week for the past two years or so. Thus the two and two-thirds completed novels and the seventy-five page “short story.” I will publish the latter–called Paradox City–on Amazon as soon as it’s in shape to do so, and I am going to continue to publish serially the chapters of both Mark Red and The Chasm and the Collision as I get them in shape to do so as well. I will begin to publish the third novel, Son of Man, the same way, as I get it ready.
I am doing this under the imprint of my own publishing company, which is called Chronic Publications, a company which I envisioned at least as far back as high school. I am soon going to be incorporating it (as a Florida corporation), and carrying out my intention of giving half the after-tax proceeds to literacy charities. As a writer, how could I do otherwise? Without written language, civilization would not exist. For anyone at all to be deprived of the joy of partaking in that fact in the modern world is unforgivable.
So that’s a little hint of the shape of things to come, at least as it pertains to this blog. I hope to keep you entertained, perhaps to provoke some thought, and in any case, to indulge myself here. If you like it, please share it (you don’t need to put a ring on it, though). I really am going to try to make a difference in the world from here on in, so the more people I can reach, the better.
In the meantime, thank you for reading, if you are reading. Well, if you aren’t you can’t experience my thanks, anyway, so I guess it goes without saying. Trees falling in woods while no one’s listening, and all that…
TTFN: Ta-ta-for-now!
Robert Elessar 