Promotion

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Glory is like a circle in the water, which never ceaseth to enlarge itself, till, by broad blogging, it disperse to naught.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, as you probably know if you’re reading this on the day it’s posted (if not, there’s only about a 1 in 7 chance* that it’s Thursday when you’re reading it).  This is to be a “typical” blog post, in the “old” style, but I don’t know how much difference that will make compared to other days‒except that I will not be giving you a report on today’s fiction writing, since there has been none.

I’m writing this post on my smartphone.  There are reasons I’m doing it thusly rather than on my laptop computer, but I won’t get into them right now.  I did bring my computer with me, intending to write this on it, but doing so can be mildly cumbersome at times.  It also doesn’t have illuminated keys‒those would have cost a lot more when I bought it‒whereas a smartphone perforce has luminous keys, since all its keys and other features are virtual.

Speaking of smartphones, I’ve recently been thinking about trying my hand at Instagram.  I don’t have the app on my phone, but of course I have an account (since Facebook gave everyone on Facebook an account).  I’ve even recently started following a few people on it.  I’m not particularly photogenic or anything, but I guess Instagram has wider reach than, for instance, blogs on WordPress.  This might give it an advantage as a way to promote my writing and maybe as a way to express other things.  I have no interest in TikTok, but maybe, since Instagram is already part of the Facebook platform, I could try it.

Of course, I have a YouTube channel, but that has never garnered me many views, and the process of making (and editing) videos for it is cumbersome.  I get the impression that there is in-app video production and editing via Instagram.  I know, giving my daily writing reports (for instance) via Instagram may seem like a betrayal of my commitment to the written word as the lifeblood of civilization, but it would be an attempt to promote my blog and more importantly my fiction, so perhaps it would be tolerable.  My soul is worthless anyway, so if I can sell it and get something out of it, maybe I should (METAphorically speaking…get it?).

I think you have to download the Instagram app into your phone to be able to upload videos, or at least I haven’t seen how to do it from a desktop.  But I haven’t looked very hard, either.  I think you can upload photos from the desktop.

Of course, I’m no fun to look at, so no one would come to my account because of my physical beauty…but I do look a little bit like the guy who reads all the signs in funny voices and inflections**, and that guy is hilarious and apparently quite popular (I would add a link, but I don’t know his account name).

I’ve occasionally thought of linking this account to Patreon, but it’s hard to imagine anyone paying even a dollar a month for my blog.  Likewise, I’ve thought about getting on Substack, but if I were to do that, I’d need to make a commitment to putting out more serious, or at least more thoughtful, material.  Also, long-term plans seem frankly comical for me, since I neither expect nor desire a long term.  I can barely get through a day, and I certainly cannot sleep through a night.

For instance, yesterday I had to leave work after lunch because everything from just below my diaphragm on down was in spasm and I was unable to make it resolve despite excessive aspirin and acetaminophen and so on.  Obviously, I did not get a good sleep last night, despite getting back to the house early.  At least the pain has been moderated a bit by my physical rest.

I guess even if I were to die today, given how bad my sleep has been for so many years, I’ve probably had as much “awake” time as a typical American man who dies when he’s 76.  Perhaps more.  I’d have to do the math.  Maybe I will.  Hang on a minute…

Okay, quickly and dirtily, and assuming that sleep change is lifelong and daily, a person who sleeps only 4 hours a day (which is often more than I sleep) will have reached as many waking hours as an 8-hours-a-day 76 year old person by the time the 4-hour person is 60.8 years old.  Of course, those years will be comparatively miserable and groggy and filled with the many consequences of sleep deprivation.  Frankly, 60 years is way too many.  I am not going to put up with 6 more years of this.  I don’t want to put up with 6 more days, and honestly, six hours is often barely achievable.  One of these days it won’t be.

In lighter news, I finally ordered some 6 x 9 spiral-bound “5 Star” notebooks and they arrived yesterday.  My plan is to transcribe into one of them what I’ve written on HELIOS and then continue writing the first draft there.  The ballooning size of Extra Body, and before that Outlaw’s Mind, has made me think I really need to do that.

Don’t get me wrong, neither of those stories could ever have been true “short stories” and I like what’s developed from them.  But I’m sure that my concision has suffered because it’s just so easy to write on the computer, and I get carried away, like someone with ASD who starts talking about a “special interest”.  Maybe that’s why I do it.

I wrote the first drafts of Mark Red, The Chasm and the Collision, and the borderline novella Paradox City on notebook paper, perched on my bunk, on a photo album-style book on my footlocker at just after lights-on (about 3:30 am) every morning at FSP West, and CatC is my sister’s favorite of my stories.  And you may already know that I wrote Solitaire all in one sitting, in a 6 x 9 spiral-bound notebook, while keeping my not-yet-girlfriend (also not-yet-fiancée, not-yet-wife, not-yet-ex-wife) company all night while she worked on a project for her summer job.  Also, parts of the original draft for The Vagabond were written by hand while I was in college and med school.  I finished it on a Mac SE, but those weren’t quite as handy and quick as modern laptop computers.

Anyway, I have this stupidly optimistic (and thus unrealistic) notion that I might actually write HELIOS in such a fashion.  We’ll see, but I wouldn’t hold your breath if I were you.

As always, I would welcome feedback in the comments below about any of the topics mentioned above‒especially about Instagram and the like.  Feedback here works best, in general, but obviously I don’t get very much of it whether here or in other venues, so I suppose I should be grateful for whatever I can get.

This blog post has felt quite long, but it’s actually not too terribly lengthy, so I guess writing on my smartphone has made a difference.  Imagine if I had to write this by hand before entering it into WordPress!  That’s not going to happen, of course, but it’s interesting to contemplate what it would be like.

I hope you all have a good day, and a good week, and month, and year, and so on.  Please take care of yourselves and of those you love and those who love you.

TTFN

*I say “about”, even though days of the week are evenly distributed, because there may be factors that influence the likelihood of someone reading something on any given day.  People may be more likely to read an “old” blog post on, say, the weekend than during the week, or on particular weekdays rather than others, and this distribution is likely to be multifactorial, so I cannot, in good faith, say the chance is exactly 1 in 7.

**I know this because once, I was watching one of that guy’s “reels” and someone came up behind me and asked if that was me in the video, or perhaps someone to whom I was related.

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Would YOU eat Zel’dovich pancakes for breakfast?

It’s Tuesday, and I’m writing another blog post rather than throwing some kind of curve ball and doing my fiction writing today, since I wrote a blog post yesterday, when I had scheduled myself to write some fiction.  I don’t know if that counts as a double curve ball or as a capitulation to a simple, over-the-plate, none-too-fast soft pitch.  It’s probably the latter, but I suppose there is no absolute right answer, and the judgment would depend upon one’s point of view.

I’ve realized that, contrary to what I wrote yesterday‒to what I honestly thought was the case‒I did not bring my small laptop computer with me when I left the office on Thursday.  I had unplugged it with the intention to pack it, but then I had left without it.  I can’t recall ever having done that before.  It goes to show just how crappy I felt on Thursday, I guess.

I really want to keep writing fiction.  It would be a shame to take this new story that I’ve well begun, with over 10,000 words written so far, and let it just fall by the wayside.  Then again, I’ve left The Dark Fairy and the Desperado hanging, and more egregiously, I’ve left Outlaw’s Mind hanging, so it’s not as though there is no precedent.  And, of course, in the past I’ve left stories incomplete many, many times.  But it seems particularly sad, now that I’ve published 5 novels and 2 collections of “short” stories, to fall back into that pattern.

But I need to find a way to be able to work fiction writing into my daily routines without messing up habits that have become somewhat compulsory for me.  I’ve tried to find ways to block out the noise in the office, so far without much success.  Yesterday I bought a rather inexpensive pair of noise-canceling headphones.  They didn’t do that good a job at the noise canceling; they reduced it a bit, but it was still there, though if I put in earplugs as well and then also played a YouTube video about field theories and similar stuff, if helped, but that is certainly not a combination of measures I could take while trying to write fiction.

I’m of two minds (at least) about the headphones.  I’m glad I didn’t spend very much on them, since they don’t turn out to be as effective as my more old-fashioned, gun-range and airport style ear defenders (when combined with ear plugs).  They can also play music or the sound from videos, but I didn’t get them for that.  I already have things that can do that.  But I wonder if more expensive ones would do any better.

It’s a shame that no high-powered movie executive has read any of my books or stories and approached me to option them for movies or shows or anything, but it’s obviously not surprising.  I’m terrible at self-promotion, more by temperament than merely due to lack of skill.  This blog is my closest approach to self-promotion, and I spend most of my time here spewing my random and often depressed and depressing thoughts in some wishful, pseudo-Freudian free association kind of exercise.

Of course, it’s about as useful to me as Freudian psychoanalysis* ever has been clinically demonstrated to be for anyone, which is to say, very little, if at all.  Nevertheless‒and also like psychoanalysis for many of its patients‒it has been habit forming, and I feel awkward and disjointed without it.

Also, as I noted yesterday, it’s the only means by which I keep contact with anyone other than my sister in the world outside of the office.  I’ve really become a shell of my former self, and the fact that there is physically more of me now than there has ever been before only makes that more biting, the irony enhancing the contrast with the past, when I used to relieve suffering and save lives and be beneficial to the world.

Ah, well.  From a cosmic perspective, all such benefits will probably be transitory, or effectively be nonexistent.

Which reminds me:  yesterday I was looking at the abstracts of some recent papers on “quantum cosmology” uploaded onto arXiv, the preprint server.  Obviously, most of these subjects were well beyond my expertise truly to be able to follow, but I get the concepts involved in most of them.  Also, exposure to the mathematical formalism when I don’t know how to manipulate it often makes it easier to understand later, as there is familiarity and applicability that helps add to the more complete picture I gradually build in my mind about such things.

This has happened to me more than once in the past.  I don’t learn by rote, I learn by building mental models and maps and structures that link areas of knowledge and understanding together.  So, I don’t learn quickly, but I learn deeply and durably.  I think this is a much better way to go.

Anyway, that’s tangential.  What was amusing is, I read about a paper involving some deSitter** models of inflation in a universe which (if I recall the abstract correctly) was matter-dominated in early moments and so had no uniform pressure (unlike radiation-dominated situations, which, if I’m remembering correctly, is pressure intensive and homogeneous, and is how our early universe probably was).  In such models, if I understood the point correctly, you could find more noteworthy inhomogeneities than seen in radiation-dominated phases, which makes sense, since the radiation pressure works against gravitational collapse.

So, the model discussed would be unlike our universe, in which the CMB demonstrates extreme homogeneity, down to a few parts in a hundred thousand, even from one edge of the cosmic horizon to the opposite edge, encompassing regions that could never possibly have been in any form of direct causal contact at least since the hypothetical time of inflation.  The light from each side has only just now reached us, and so is only halfway across to the other side, and may well never reach it if the universe expands quickly enough.  Yet the temperatures are the same to a few parts in a hundred thousand, which is probably more than can be said about the room you’re sitting in now.

One type of this theoretical homogeneity in the model in the abstract had apparently been previously described as a “Zel’dovich pancake”.  This is apparently nothing new (first described in the 1970s), but is a really amusing way to think of a cosmic structure, and I kind of want to look into it and see what it describes, to see if I can understand, at least superficially, the math behind it.

Wow, that was a whole ‘nother tangent of much greater departure than before.  I think I’ll call that good for now for this day’s blog.  I’m kind of all over the place, and if I’m not too careful, I might undergo decoherence and split into multiple versions of myself.  That seems all too possible, since I’ve never been naturally inclined to very impressive coherence in the first place.

I will probably be writing here tomorrow.

*Not to be confused with the more general term “psychotherapy”, which can be useful depending on the type of therapy and the person receiving it.  CBT is one of the most effective of these; it didn’t work all that well for me, but I’m annoying and perverse, so that’s no surprise.

**DeSitter spacetimes are just spacetimes with positive cosmological constants‒like our universe, with its apparent “dark energy”‒which will tend to drive accelerating expansion.  The whole “holographic universe” concept was motivated, or perhaps inspired, partly by the Bekenstein-Hawking recognition that the maximal entropy of any region of spacetime is defined by the surface area of an event horizon the size of that region.  Any greater entropy in the region would add to the mass of the black hole associated with that horizon, and so would make the horizon larger; thus that is the maximal entropy for that initial region.  QED (Quod erat demonstrandum, not quantum electrodynamics) if you will.  The holographic principle regarding a universe has only ever been worked out for anti-deSitter spaces, with negative cosmological constants, which we know is not the case for the universe in which we live because…well, because we’re alive, and those spacetimes tend to collapse rapidly.

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Add title. Beat until foamy and stir until well mixed

It’s Wednesday morning at almost exactly 5 o’clock, and I’m writing this on my phone today, because I did not take my laptop with me yesterday afternoon.  I did walk from the train to the house in the evening, though, even though I got out of the office slightly late.  It was a decent walk, and I had a nice talk with my sister* while I did it.

Today, except for the phone conversation, I plan to do a repeat, which would be good.  Between yesterday and the day before, I walked a total of about 15 miles.  That’s not too bad.  I was very thirsty by the time I got back to the house, and I drank a largish bottle of seltzer nearly all in one go (not quite, of course‒that’s hard to do with fizzy water because of the carbonation).

Otherwise, let’s see, is there any real news?  Oh!  Well, I was able to get the payroll done a day early yesterday, because the report we usually get on Wednesday is going to be practically nonexistent.  At most there might be minor adjustments.  So, that’s good in its way; there will be far less stress during the day today.  I only wish I had other ways to engage my mind when things are not as busy.  Unfortunately, as I think you know, I’ve been having real trouble finding even any nonfiction reading that’s engaging, let alone any fiction.

Oh, yes, and I certainly haven’t started writing any new fiction, whether HELIOS, which I mentioned yesterday, or any other of the ideas I have about which I could write.  There’s been no sign that anyone is even politely interested in that prospect.

I sometimes‒often‒envy some other bloggers who have a vibrant comments section.  Indeed, there is a site to which I go every day, on which I find the posts interesting and also often find the comments interesting.  Many days‒perhaps more often than not‒I will even leave comments, myself.  Usually it’s nothing very deep; I leave compliments on pictures shared by other readers when I like them, or I’ll make a stupid reference or joke of some kind.  I don’t know if my few comments are ever very interesting to anyone.  I often suspect that I’m just annoying to pretty much everyone else who uses the site.  But it’s nice that they always have some comments.  It makes the whole thing feel like discussions more than articles, really.

Of course, that particular writer has a few tens of thousands of people following his site, so I can’t expect his engagement, even if the percentage of people who comment were the same.  Also, let’s be honest, my stuff isn’t necessarily all that interesting.

I suppose, in the age of social media, it’s possible‒in principle, at least‒for almost anyone to get a large following, at least by old time standards, but the barrier to be cleared is actually to reach people who might be interested.  Of course, I share my posts on TSFKAT**, and on Facebook, and even on LinkedIn, but I don’t have many followers on those sites, and I don’t know how the algorithm pushes any of my posts, or Xpostulatiions, or links, or whatever.

Back in the day, when I was promoting my books (sort of), I paid to boost a few posts on Facebook, but I don’t know that it did much.  I couldn’t afford to boost them much, let alone to do a paid Amazon promotion or anything of the sort.

Advertising or even asking people to “Like” and “share”*** always feels somewhat suspect to me.  I feel as though it’s a sign of poor character for me to try to get people to know about my work through anything other than word of mouth.  I have a species of very low self-esteem.  Perhaps it’s a defense mechanism.  I fear that if I were even somewhat narcissistic or entitled or whatever, I would end up doing a tremendous amount of damage.  Maybe even that fear is rather egotistical.  Probably it’s just that I honestly don’t like myself, and so have a very hard time pushing my stuff, even when I think that stuff is pretty good.

And I do think most of my fiction is pretty good.  It’s never going to rival the works of Tolkien, or Stephen King, or J. K. Rowling or anyone at that level.  But I think there are readers out there who would like the stories if they ever became aware of them.  It would be nice at least to be able to do that tiny little amount of good in the world entailed in writing a story that some people enjoy reading, even if they only enjoy it a little.

Of course, there’s no point promoting anything I do on YouTube.  It would be a bit weird for me to make a video to promote a blog.  I guess reading some of my stories out loud and sharing those “videos” is promotional, in a way.  Maybe I should read some of my blog posts as a YouTube video or something.  If so, which ones would I choose?  Any suggestions?

Of course, though I automatically have an Instagram account via Facebook, I certainly don’t use it.  And I sure as Hell don’t have TikTok.  I think I made a Tumblr account once, but I have no idea what it was or how to access it, and in any case, I don’t really look at Tumblr.  I know I had a Pinterest account, and I think that site is still up and running, but again, it doesn’t do too well with written matter.

Oh, well.  I like WordPress.  It’s nice to be able to share daily thoughts in writing, and for the most part, not to torture anyone with my face and/or voice.  And I like to read a lot of the things other people write, though I wish I could read more‒not just that I had enough time, but that I had the will and capacity to read.  Anyone who knew me back in the day, so to speak, would know just how horrible it is for me not to be able to read fiction (or even much nonfiction).  It’s a bit like not being able to breathe, but it kills you much more slowly, so the torment is drawn out.

Anyway, if any of you feel like it, please do like, share, and even comment on this or other posts of mine.  If you’ve read any of my books and want to share info about them, that would of course, be welcome and greatly appreciated.  Likewise (but less likely) for my music.

And if anyone actually would like to watch/listen to me reading any of my blog posts via a YouTube video, and you have any posts in mind, please let me know.  You can leave a comment anonymously if you like, so you don’t have to fear too much backlash for encouraging the likes of me.

Thank you for reading, no matter what.  And please, do have a good day.

*On the phone, which I guess is obvious; she didn’t come down to Florida just to accompany me from the train station to the house.

**The site formerly known as Twitter.

***That reminds me of a song…

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Picture and Shakespeare “quote” deferred due to mechanical difficulties

Hello and good morning, everyone (or at least, everyone who’s reading this).  It’s Thursday, the 19th day of January, which means it’s also the 19th day of 2023 by our standard dating system.  And I suppose you could say it’s the 384th day of 2022, if you were being rather unorthodox…though that might lead one to ask what day it is of 2021, and of 2020, and so on.

That way madness lies.  I ought to know.

Yesterday, I published the draft of The Dark Fairy and the Desperado as far as I’ve written it‒about 100 pages worth on MS Word, single spaced, in Calibri 11-point.  I included quite a few “illustrations”, which is another way to say that I posted quite a few of the drawings* I did way back when I was first thinking of the story.  As you may be able to tell, I had planned a lot of the things that have happened so far in the story even 10 or 15 years ago.

There were a few drawings of the meeting of the Desperado and the wizard that I haven’t been able to locate‒some of them are probably on my old MySpace page.  Yes, it’s out there still, MySpace, but it’s sure as hell not what it used to be.  More’s the pity.  I liked MySpace in its original form.  It was much more wholesome than Facebook or Twitter, and for my money (so to speak) mostly more interesting.

As an aside, the same idiotic, loud and screamy woman I mentioned the other day is having another piercing, shouted conversation on the other side of the road again this morning‒or who knows, I guess it could still be the same conversation.  Maybe she really is mentally ill.  Why else would someone have prolonged, shouted discussions at 5:22 in the morning more than once in a single week, even if they are talking on the phone and there’s some real person on the other end?  Surely any grasp of decorum at all‒indeed, even the slightest functioning of the mediating aspect of the frontal lobes‒would make a person refrain from such displays.

Oh, well, anyway, back to DFandD.

I reread much of what I have written so far in the process of posting it and especially of inserting the pictures.  There is much editing that could be done, of course, but then again, it really is a first draft.  Still, I thought it was reasonably good.  Certainly, it’s a more light-hearted story than Outlaw’s Mind, but then again, it’s not a horror story.  Even though the two main‒indeed, title‒characters are a supremely deadly gunfighter and a fairy who hates humans and likes hurling magical fire at them, and it begins with the Desperado nearly dying of thirst in the desert, it’s actually comparatively upbeat, at least for my writing.

I’m not the greatest self-salesman, am I?  I have a difficult time saying positive things about anything that I’ve done or made, even when I actually am trying to promote them.  I have a very hard time talking myself up, even to myself.  I’m not my own biggest fan.

In any case, yesterday I effectively took the day off from writing, since I posted that draft.  I had a brief return to my prior commute for the day, which was a little easier, but it also left me feeling a bit stiff.  Today, I’m back to the bus, as you may have (correctly) inferred from my mention of the screaming woman, just a bit ago.

I do like the extra walking that I get from taking the bus to the train, and then back again at the end of the day.  It’s a bit more pleasant today than it was most of the last week, because the temperature is in the sixties.  Also, of course, my commute is relatively environmentally friendly, since I’m using mass transit (though, she below).

All that is surely fairly uninteresting to all of you all.  It wouldn’t be interesting to me if it weren’t happening to me, honestly, and even that barely brings it into the level of being worthy of my own notice.  I would love to be able to sleep through it all, though I don’t know what type of blog I might write if I did it in my sleep.  Who knows?  Maybe it would be better than it otherwise is.

Anyway, back to the main point.  I would be interested in what anyone thinks who reads The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, especially as compared to Outlaw’s Mind (or any of my published stuff, too, I guess).  So please, feel free to share your reactions in the comments below, or on the actual posting of the story.

And, still, if anyone out there knows how to check the results of WordPress polls from the inside, I’d love to know without having to go to the trouble of trying to contact the “happiness engineers” at WordPress**.  Though, in all likelihood, there have been no more than 4 people responding since I posted the poll in the first place, and one of those people was I.

I voted for me to stop writing, for Cat’s sake.

TTFN

[Note:  I apologize for the relative lateness of this post.  The train I rode this morning had a mechanical failure, in that the engine died, and we had to wait for a (delayed) subsequent train, which was very overcrowded, and I arrived at my stop about an hour later than I would have otherwise.  This is the third time this week that the Tri Rail system has had delays or cancellations of trains I’ve taken.  If any of you know any of the responsible people behind this, please give them a stern talking-to.  Thank you.]

*Some were just in pencil, some in plain ink, and some colored either using colored pencils or watercolor paint/ink or even using Photoshop.

**Honestly, can you think of a more nauseatingly pseudo-positive euphemism for customer service?  Jeez, Louise!

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Much ado about what are effectively mere fluctuations in the vacuum states of quantum fields

Okay, it’s the “middle” of the “work week” and this is my next daily “blog post”, in case any of you reading didn’t know these things.

I made a video yesterday, and I even pretty much edited it, but I haven’t yet posted it to YouTube, and so I cannot share/embed it here.  It was a free-form recording, and ended up being essentially a form of minor self-promotion, in which I encourage people to buy my books (and to a lesser extent to listen to my music) if they want to support me—though that raises the question of whether anyone would ever want to support me in the first place.  In my experience, the answer is “no”.  Heck, I don’t even want to support myself.

But it does show, at least, that I have a certain amount of affection, bordering on pride, for my fiction, and indeed, I am reasonably proud of my books and short stories.  I’m even fairly proud of my songs, though I wish I’d had better equipment to record and produce them.  Still, considering I was literally learning as I went along, I think they came out okay.

I will say this, though—I don’t think I’m going to be making many more videos using my Samsung tablet.  In addition to giving me the black sidebar thingies, which I chose to accept, since lateral videos just need to have background edited out, it also records at way too high a definition, and so videos take up an absurd amount of memory.  I suppose this would be useful and good if I were recording fine visuals, so I have no actual complaints about the tablet’s camera quality, but when the picture is basically just me then frankly, the lower the definition the better.

If I could be rendered in 8-bit graphics, it probably wouldn’t be a horrible thing.

Also, upon sending the video to the desktop, via Google Drive, I couldn’t import it directly into DaVinci* Resolve without the video getting all higgledy-piggledy**, so I had first to import it into the Microsoft video editor (I took advantage and adjusted the audio right then and there at an earlier step than usual), then export it to import into Resolve.  But, of course, even after doing that, and adjusting the output for only medium video quality, the file was still huge.

How much impact on the environment is occurring because of all the memory being generated and all the electricity needed to operate and cool all the huge servers which we use to run and store just the videos we use and the documents in Google Drives and the like?  Might it be more ecologically efficient if we literally just recorded the entire internet on old-fashioned paper?

If we get the wood pulp from tree farms, it would not decrease the forests in the world, and in fact, the paper would be, at least for a time, an effective carbon sink.  Interesting, no?  It just goes to show you, real situations are complicated, and your first, instinctive reactions are often inaccurate.  It’s hard to store an actual video on paper of course, but celluloid is another matter…though that is extremely flammable.

I think for my next video, I’m just going to try to use the camera on the little laptop on which I write this blog post.  It’s comparatively low definition, which is fine with me.  If the microphone were better I might use it for everything, except the Resolve parts.  I’ve tried attaching my USB microphone to a mini laptop once and it didn’t work well—but I think that might have been my previous laptop, not this one.  I think I have tried the native microphone for this laptop, and it was good enough for general recording.

Anyway, that’s yet another blog post about nothing, following on a video about nothing after a previous blog post about nothing.  It’s fine, though, since really everything is about nothing.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we’re all just (metaphorical) virtual particles***, popping into existence, sometimes (rarely) having externally felt mass effects, and then vanishing back into the nothingness from which we arose before a Planck time (metaphorically, again) has even passed.  Though, en masse, we can have local effects, any individual virtual particle (it would be pairs of particles, really, if the metaphor were strictly applied) effectively does not exist at all, from the point of view of the outside universe.  Think on that, and…

…have a nice day.

*Which seems to imply that the program comes from the city of Vinci, which is in Tuscany, in Italy.  DaVinci wasn’t Leonardo’s “last name” in the modern use of such things, it was just an indicator of where he was from, like Conan of Cimmeria or Simon of Sheboygan.  When people use “DaVinci” to refer to Leonardo as if it were his last name, it leads to some humorous effects at times, if you’re paying attention and applying the literal meaning of the words.

**Please excuse the technical jargon.

***Strictly speaking, virtual particles are sort of metaphorical even in quantum mechanics, at least according to my best understanding.  They really are a shorthand for a more sophisticated process involving quantum fields, but I guess it’s easier to think of things as virtual particles.  That seems to complicate matters unnecessarily, to me, not make them simpler, but I’m weird.

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A brief reminder of my “audio stories”

Well, I’m working today—as I will also be doing Monday—so, obviously, I’m writing a blog post.  Aren’t you excited?

When I arrived at the train station this morning, I thought the whole system was shut down somehow, because the “garage-door” style barriers were closed, blocking the stairs, the elevators, and the payment machines, like they do when there’s a hurricane coming (there isn’t…I check frequently).  However, it turns out that the guy who opens them just hadn’t arrived yet.  He only arrived after I had gone all the way down to the end of the station to the road to cross the tracks and had come all the way back up on the side on which I need to be.

Ah, well, it’s a little bit of extra exercise, and that can’t be too bad, can it?

I planned yesterday to mention the subject of some of my reading-aloud “videos” of my fiction, but the post got to be too long, and it would have been a very abrupt change of topic, considering I was writing about my difficulties seeking and finding and begging for help when one is circling the drain, as I am.  I haven’t gotten any useful answers, other than a commiserating one to the effect, “Whataya gonna do?  You just gotta keep on moving.”  I can respect that attitude.  It’s far better than someone pretending to have answers when they don’t.  But it doesn’t help me figure out why one should bother to keep moving.  I can’t see any reason, honestly, and the effort has long outweighed the reward for me.  I’m frankly skeptical that there is any reward at all, or that there has been one for some time.

Anyway.

Quite a while ago, I did some recordings of me reading some of my stories, and I turned them into videos, though the “video” portion is nothing but the cover of the story in question.  I think they came out reasonably well; I’ve always been decent at reading stories out loud.  But they didn’t and don’t get much play, even though they are a free way to listen to my (already cheap) short stories, which is why I stopped doing them.

I also recorded and uploaded onto YouTube the first nine chapters of my book The Chasm and the Collision.  This is my most family friendly story, since I wrote it with my kids—who were in fifth and fourth grades when I started it, I think—in mind.  It a story about three middle-school students who become caught up in a trans-universal “fantasy”* adventure.

Thanks to the very wise advice of my father, there’s not even a single curse word in the whole book, though there are scary bits, since there is real danger in the story.  Real danger to the characters, I mean.  I don’t mean to say that reading the story is dangerous.  It’s not.  My sister has read the book several times, now, and she says it’s her favorite of my stories.  As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with the fact that she fell and hit her head earlier this week.

I recorded the first nine chapters, but I finally stopped doing it, because, as I said, no one seemed to be listening.  I thought it was a shame, but it was a lot of work to do the reading and then the editing of the audio (though it helped me learn Audacity, which was definitely worthwhile).  Since then, at various times, I’ve thought that maybe I would like to pick up on reading the chapters and uploading them, and then maybe even start to record and upload my other books, a bit at a time**.  I’ve also got a few more short stories and novellas that I haven’t recorded and uploaded, and they could be stand-alone “videos”.  But, again, it’s a lot of work, and it would be doubly frustrating if no one ever listens.

I’m embedding here, below, the YouTube video of the first chapter of The Chasm and the Collision, so that people can get a sample of it.  I’m also going to see if it’s possible to embed the YouTube playlist that is all the “videos” that I’ve done so far from that book, and maybe even the playlist that has the “short” stories that I’ve read aloud and posted.  Again, it’s a good way for people to get exposed to the stories*** for free.

If you listen and like them, I obviously would be delighted if you’d decide to buy them.  All my stories are available for Kindle, and my novels and collections are available in paperback as well.  My last collection, Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities is even available in hardback.  Here’s a link to my Amazon author’s page, so you can peruse them:  The Link.

If there’s more than one person out there who would be interested in hearing more of me reading my stories, please let me know in the comments below.  You can also leave story-related comments on YouTube.

Nowadays one can self-publish for Audible, which is kind of neat, but I think I’m going to stick with the YouTube format, because it’s more informal, and it’s free for listeners so they can introduce themselves to the stories, as read by the author.  I’m very self-hating in general, and that hasn’t changed, but I think my stories are pretty good, and I’m especially proud of The Chasm and the Collision, because I wrote it with my kids in mind—though I don’t think either of them has ever read it, and they probably never will.

That’s about all I have for today.  Nothing has really changed since yesterday, so there’s no other real news to give.  Have a good holiday weekend, for those of you in the United States.  And everyone else, I hope you just have a good weekend.

Here’s the embedding of those videos and playlists, if I can successfully do the latter:

*I put that in “scare quotes” because if you pay attention when you read it, you’ll notice it’s actually a science fiction story.  But the character of the tale is definitely more like fantasy than sci-fi.

**Boy howdy, wouldn’t Unanimity end up taking up a looooooong time?

***That makes them sound radioactive, somehow.  As far as I know, they are not.

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Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your blogs? your flashes of merriment…

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday (July 14th, 2022), and so it’s time for my normal, usual, regular weekly blog post—as opposed to the semi-daily posts I wrote last Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, and this week on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday so far, in case anyone reading here today didn’t know I was doing them.  If you read my weekly blog posts, and if you find my writing either entertaining or morbidly fascinating or some other adjective that makes you want to read more, do feel free to check those out.

Heck, while you’re at it, if you like my writing, why not consider buying and reading some of my actual novels or short stories or collections?  You can find all of them on Amazon, and a few of them are also available through Wal-Mart’s website and Books-A-Million as well, I think.  If you do happen to read something of mine, please at least rate it afterwards (if through Amazon, anyway), even if you don’t feel like leaving a review.  Be brutal, be frank, that’s fine, but please rate if you can.

Okay, that’s got that bit of self-promotion out of the way.  Trust me, it’s not an easy thing for me to do.  As I think I’ve said before, I’m not very keen on myself as a person—I don’t like to spend time in my own company, but I don’t have much choice about doing so, though there are choices of sorts—and so I feel rather awkward trying to promote my works.  But I think I’m a decent author.  At least, I like my stories for the most part, and believe me, I’m not prone to be kind to myself.

I like some of my works more than others, but that’s almost inevitable.  If I liked them all equally and unconditionally, it would be hard for me to think I could recommend any of them.  Unconditional love, as I’m fond of saying, is worth what you have to do to earn it.  Or, to paraphrase Dash from The Incredibles, reflexively saying “Everyone’s special” is just another way of saying that no one is.

Of course, it’s possible for everyone to be special but in different ways and to differing degrees among the many ways it’s possible to be special, and this is almost certainly the case in reality.  By genes alone there are many more ways to be human (or whatever species I am) than there have been people who have ever lived, and then there are all the other variables raised by environment and the astonishingly plastic and adaptable and versatile nervous system humans have*, meaning there are many more orders of magnitude of ways for a mind to form even beyond genetic variability.  Frankly, I’m amazed it doesn’t go worse than it does more often.

Despite my own endorsement of my stories, I’m not able to rouse myself to write any fiction for now, so I’ll continue to write daily blog posts for the nonce**.  For all I know, I may never write any more fiction again.  In fact, based on my self-assessment, I would give fairly high odds that I won’t, just as I don’t think these daily blog posts will go on that much longer.  There seems little point in continuing to try to do much of anything in the long run, at least for me.

But who knows?  Maybe I’m wrong.  Prediction is a tricky business, especially about the future***.

I am thinking (very vaguely, to be fair) about reading aloud some more of the chapters of The Chasm and the Collision and sharing them here and on YouTube as “videos” as I’ve done for the first (I think) nine chapters so far, and as I’ve done for some of my short stories.  It always feels a little weird putting up a “video” that’s really just an audio recording accompanied by a single graphic image, but it would feel even weirder to make an actual video of me just reading my story.  Looking at my face while trying to listen to a novel isn’t going to help anyone’s enjoyment.

With that, I think I’ll begin drawing to a close for the day on this, my usual weekly blog post.  There’s nothing much going on other than these blog posts.  I haven’t played guitar in weeks, nor written any fiction, and I don’t see that turning around.  Similarly, I don’t really do anything for fun in the evenings after work, nor on weekends…nor during work hours for that matter.  I have a hard time even finding books that I want to read—when even The Lord of the Rings gets boring to me, I know I’m reaching the end of my resources.  I certainly don’t hang out with anyone; I’m not so cruel a sadist as to inflict my company on other people more than is absolutely necessary.  I’m basically just spending most of my time dilly-dallying near the edge of a bottomless precipice and doing a lot of glancing over and thinking that it doesn’t really look too bad down there.  It’s certainly less dull and dreary than it is up here.

TTFN

skull drawing

*Yes, I know, sometimes it doesn’t seem that the human nervous system is very adaptable and versatile, to say nothing of being very bright, but on this planet, at least, it’s definitely an outlier with respect to high complexity.  It’s not its fault that most humans make poor use of it.

**Why doesn’t the nonce write its own blog posts, you ask?  Well, the nonce is notoriously lazy but nevertheless noisily demanding.  It’s easier just to write its blog posts so it’ll shut up.

***That’s a quote—or at least a paraphrase.

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Outlaw’s Mind – Part 15

Timothy tried to put his mother’s ultimatum and her reactions—as well as his own feelings about the interaction—out of his head.  He didn’t quite succeed, but at least he was able to become calmer about the situation.  His mother, too, seemed to revert to at least a simulacrum of normalcy for the rest of the afternoon, a simulacrum that gradually morphed more and more into the real thing over the next day or so.  She didn’t bring up the subject again, though for the rest of Saturday, at least, she didn’t seem to be trying to force herself to be cheerful.

Timothy, not able to forget for long, or to ignore the change those few minutes in the car had wrought, was pensive.  His situation had subtly but drastically altered.  Before, at an unconscious level at least, he had taken a species of comfort in the knowledge that, if things should become too much, if his rages became too frequent and more uncontrollable even than they already were, he had what his mother had called “an escape clause”.  If he found that his rage was too completely the center of his life, stealing all deep pleasure from every other aspect of it, he could escape into permanent oblivion, choosing some method that would create the least possible mess and fuss, and his problems would end.  It was not a happy notion—it never had been—but there were times when it was a profound comfort, and as he’d gotten into his teenage years, it had become more and more attractive.  There had previously been no moral impediments to the idea, at least.  He was not religious, though he knew there were religious people who considered suicide an unforgivable sin.  He did not fear being consigned to Hell for having ended his own life; surely any kind of benign and compassionate God would have recognized the meaning behind his action and would at least not have punished him permanently for trying his best to protect others from harm. Continue reading →

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Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the blog

Goodo and hell morning!  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for the latest edition of my weekly blog post.  I haven’t posted any teasers this week because, as you’ll know if you follow my blog, Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities is now published, and is available in e-book, paperback, and hardcover formats.  That latter fact is rather exciting, in a silly sort of way, though I’ve yet to see a copy of the hardcover in person, so I’m not sure how good it will be.  If it’s comparable to the paperback, it will be quite nice.

I’ve considered doing some other teasers now and then—perhaps once a week—of portions of some of my other books, to try to stimulate interest in them.  Obviously, I couldn’t do all that much at once; I’m not sure that it would make sense, for instance, to post an entire chapter at a time from one of my novels, since the chapters are generally at least ten pages long, and often quite a bit longer.  Still, I’d love your feedback regarding whether you would be interested in such a thing, and if so, if you have any requests.  In other words, is there some book of mine that you think might be interesting, but you’re not sure, and so would welcome a taste of what the book might be like?

Of course, it’s like pulling teeth to get most anyone to read even a short story nowadays.  Perhaps it has ever been thus.  I may be biased by the influence of my immediate family, who were and are more avid readers than most, even accounting for the fact that when I was young cable TV hadn’t come out, let alone VCRs or DVDs, etc.  We had only black and white TVs until Cosmos arrived on public television, and I don’t remember feeling deprived.  There were always books around, plenty of them; they were prominent in the room I shared with my brother, and in my sister’s room, and in the living room.

I often lament (privately) the fact that a generation is growing up that will get almost all of its information from video of one kind or another.  But when I think about it, I guess reading has rarely been something most people spend much time doing, even in the days before television or movies but after the invention of movable type printing.  Newspapers, of course, were long the only sources of popular news, but I suspect only a minority of people seriously partook of them.  What’s more, I wouldn’t be surprised if, despite the ubiquity of video, the various online editions of newspapers and magazines now accumulate a far greater regular combined circulation and true readership now than they ever have before.

Unfortunately, many people seem not to have patience for reading anything that’s longer than 280 characters, and conversely—or obversely, or inversely, or perhaps just perversely—some “journalists” produce their news “reports” by sifting through the drek of such 280-character postings.  It’s a sad state of affairs, but maybe this is as high a level of information exchange as most of us have always reached most of the time—the level of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram—but no one had any way to hear about practically any of it, and much nonsense tended to be locally confined, and didn’t interact and reproduce with other nonsense.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t good things and quite intelligent things going on via the above-mentioned social media*; there certainly are, and YouTube has some truly excellent educational videos of various kinds.  But how I would love to imagine that, when most people are staring at their smartphones, they are avidly enjoying some e-book—fiction or otherwise, on whatever subject or in whatever genre they enjoy—or an intelligent blog or magazine article or written news from reputable sources.  If I thought that were the case, I think I might feel much less depressed than I generally do.  Maybe I wouldn’t.  After all, my depression is mainly endogenous, and it’s been very difficult to treat.  Maybe I’d hate the world and my life and myself even if I lived in some near-Utopia…though one could at least hope that such a world would have developed more effective** treatments than we currently have here.

Oh, well.  If wishes were horses, we’d all be shoulder deep in horseshit.

Back to writing:  now that The Cabinet*** is out, I’ve returned to Outlaw’s Mind, which I hadn’t realized had not been added to in about a year—not since September 10th of 2020, I think.  I’m still going through what I’d previously written, but I’ve almost reached the point where I’m going to add new material, unless something kills me first—which, to be honest, doesn’t seem like it would be such a bad thing.  I’m tired.  I’m so very tired.  The last time I can remember having a good night’s sleep and waking up feeling at all rested was back in the mid-nineties.  Literally.  I’m very tired, and I’m very much alone, but I guess this is just the general condition of life, or at least it is for people like me.  It’s October now—this being the first Thursday in October—and that’s a good month to be thinking about such things.

With that in mind, I’m sharing below a picture I’ve been working on, which is appropriate for the Halloween season.  I did the base drawing quite some time ago—a few years, I think.  I even posted it on Facebook**** at the time, if memory serves.  But I’ve decided to do a bit of playing around with smoothing the lines and coloring it in layers and so on, using the computer program GIMP, which is a wonderful freeware (if that’s still the term) program that does most of what Adobe Photoshop did and does but without requiring ridiculous monthly fees.  Look into it and give them a donation if you get a chance; it’s a great thing.  And please, let me know what you think of the current version of my drawing.  And of my books, if you get the chance.

Oh, and while you’re at it, please take good care of yourselves, your families, and your friends.  Readers and writers are the guardians of the lifeblood of all that’s good in human civilization.  You are necessary; you are essential.  And while you’re at that, do your best to take care of and/or at least be kind and polite to everyone else.  None of us created our own genes or environment, we’re all just muddling through as best we can.  And kindness, I’m led to understand, is just as contagious as cruelty, and is far more productive, and thus much stronger, in the long run.

TTFN

Welcome Home Medium in prog (2)

*And it goes without saying that WordPress is a haven for far higher-than-average quality information sharing.

**And affective treatments, ha-ha.

***I prefer to shorten it to The Cabinet rather than to use its initials, which would spell out DECoC.  I think you can see why.

****See, I even use it myself, though I haven’t gotten on it for more than two minutes at a time in ages; it stresses me out beyond endurance.

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Sing to the ear that doth thy blogs esteem and gives thy pen both skill and argument.

Hello and good morning on the last Thursday (and indeed the last day) of September in 2021.  Because it’s Thursday, it’s time for another edition of my usual blog post.  I have posted quite a few other things here over the past several days, earning me kindly electronic pats on the head from WordPress for blogging three days in a row, twice now.

I guess frequent blogging is considered a worthwhile goal for them.  But is it an instrumental goal or a primary goal?  I know what my answer to that question would be*, but that raises another interesting question, perhaps pertaining to cults, especially to ones that are flagrantly dishonest**:  What happens when one person’s instrumental goal becomes some other person’s primary goal?  Come to think of it, that question could be significant in fields ranging from religion to artificial intelligence.

Anyway, all that isn’t even tangential to what I intended to write about today.  Today I’m writing about the imminent release of Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, which is locked and loaded for publication.  I’ll send the order this evening, so it should be available for purchase starting tomorrow, October 1, 2021, as planned.  Of course, there are sometimes delays at Amazon, but those delays have hitherto always been shorter and fewer than their warnings say might happen.

I guess they use Mr. Scott’s tactic of telling people to expect the worst so that they are pleasantly surprised and even amazed and impressed when things are better than that expected worst.  This is often my general attitude toward life.  Unfortunately, life is full of surprising surprises (I’m not being redundant), and it appears to have no final “worst”.  Often, the bad things you anticipate and for which you prepare yourself—psychologically at least—are not the bad things that happen, but instead you are blindsided by something utterly unexpected.  At least it keeps you on your toes…until it knocks you off your feet, anyway.

All that notwithstanding, I’m very chuffed about a surprising fact regarding publication of my book:  It will be available in hardcover as well as paperback and e-book format!  This is being beta-tested (apparently) by Amazon, and I’m taking advantage of it.  It’s surprisingly not much more expensive than paperback publication.

I don’t know why I should be as surprised as I am; I don’t really have any good reason to think that producing a hardcover book is prohibitively more expensive than producing a paperback, other than the fact that, all my life, hardcovers have tended to be much more expensive than the paperbacks.  Perhaps, though, that’s merely a marketing decision by publishers.  Perhaps they just recognize that people are prepared to pay quite a bit more for hardcovers than they are for paperbacks***.  It’s entirely possible.  Look at the whole “organic foods” marketing protocol.  And the “non-GMO” labeling scam, or even more comically, the label “gluten free” being slapped on numerous items that are obviously gluten free, like nuts or beans or corn chips****.  The average consumer frequently strays far from the economists’ notion of a rational value maximizer.  As do the economists, themselves, ironically.

Anyway, purchasers of my new book can decide freely and for whatever reasons strike their fancies in which format to buy it.  Indeed, they can get a copy in each form if they like.  Goodness knows I am going to do that!

So, tomorrow, at some point, there will be a post here with the description and cover of Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, with links to the Amazon page for purchase.  The paperback version will also be available through some other online sellers such as Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble, and Books-A-Million, but I don’t know how soon those will be up.

I don’t encourage you to hold your breath—a day is a long time to try to do that, even if you’re a blue whale, which I assume you’re not*****—but I can at least tell you to look forward to seeing The Cabinet for sale starting tomorrow.  In it are several stories previously published only in e-book form and two stories—bookending the collection if you will—that have never previously been published.  In the meantime, and afterward, and also at any given moment, do please take care of yourselves and those you love…and try not to do any harm even to those you don’t love.

TTFN

Old hardcovers

*Instrumental.  That’s probably obvious.

**I’m speaking now to the spirit of L. Ron Hubbard.

***This is not necessarily an irrational willingness; hardcover books are empirically more durable than softcover ones, so presumably one would need to replace a given book less frequently if it were hardcover.  This is assuming that, like me, a person tends to read books one likes over and over and over and over and over again.  Of course, in some senses e-books are even more durable than hardcovers, but in other ways they are less durable.  A hardcover book might well survive the fall of civilization and a return to the bronze age or worse, but an e-book requires a power source.  I wonder if, in such a post-apocalyptic world, I would be able to work up a generator or solar power source adequate to providing power for my tablets/laptops/smartphone, so that I could read at least the already-downloaded e-books.  I certainly know how such things work, and why…and there might be plenty of spare parts around, depending on how civilization had met its end.  Well, never mind; it’d just be easier to make my way to the Spanish River Library in Boca (or some similar beautiful library) and read the print books there.  Not that generators wouldn’t be useful for other purposes as well, of course, but those purposes are not as important as books.

****I would only be mildly surprised to find a pack of batteries or a household appliance labelled proudly with the words “gluten-free, non-GMO”.  Ah, humans.  They’re so funny.

*****Wouldn’t it be delightful if I were wrong about that, and there’s a blue whale out there who follows my blog?