Publishing

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Not much to report, but that never stops me

I’m writing this post on my mini lapcom today, because I brought it back to the house with me over the weekend.  The idea was to have it with me so I can work on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.  I have that file open—I had originally saved it with the Word app on my phone, I think, so I had to download the latest version of it and adjust the settings, which had a ridiculously large indentation.  Still, I haven’t started rereading and/or editing what I have yet, nor have I yet written anything new on it.

It’s funny that I think of it as a little bit of a story so far when it’s over 100 Microsoft pages (in Calibri, font size 11, no spaces between paragraphs) and over 70,000 words long.  I know of some complete “novels” that are not much longer than that.  I think it might already be longer than Extra Body, which I consider a novella.  Let me look…

Okay, it’s not longer, since Extra Body is almost 77,000 words long, but it’s getting close.  I had intended to publish the latter as a novella, in Kindle and paperback versions, but I got burned out by other things and didn’t have the energy to edit it.  It is posted on this blog (see the link above) in case you want to read it.  I think it appears in reverse order thanks to the way my blog lists things newest first then going backward.  There may be a way to reverse that—I would suspect there should be—but I don’t have the mental energy to look into how to do it.  I don’t have the mental energy for very much lately.

Actually, my physical energy is lagging a bit as well, at the moment.  I am still fighting that cold I had a few days ago, and I have partly lost my voice.  But I don’t think I have a fever nor other hallmarks of systemic infection, and though I’m coughing up some goo, there’s no evidence of any life-threatening pneumonia, unfortunately.  I’m going to work, nevertheless.  I will be masking* today, and I don’t think I’ll be talking on the phone at all, but I can still do all my clerical and computer and office management stuff.

I don’t really do any sales myself, but that’s not because I wasn’t able to do it.  That’s how I started here.  I just am better at other aspects of the office work, so I do those.  Also, I have a very hard time hearing things on some of the phones, and I doubt that’s gotten better with the tinnitus now in both ears (yes, of course, it persists, like the horrors do and like I do).

During the latest part of last week, I meant to try to look at and work on DFandD in the office, but though I did get it set up and corrected the tabs, I didn’t so much as look at it afterwards, though there were moments when I could have done so.  I’m going to need to work on that, or else do my writing on it in the morning and perhaps put aside this blog most days.  I’d rather not do that; this blog is nearly my only connection with the outside world.

I don’t know what is going to happen, of course.  I really ought to publish Extra Body formally—though that would require removing it from this blog—before I even do more work on DFandD.  Heck, if I’m doing things in order, I really should finish Outlaw’s Mind first, which started out as a short story but has become a novel, one that ties into other parts of my already-written and not-yet-written universes.

But almost all of the wind has been taken from my sails over the years.  I have no real support of any kind, not anywhere near me, anyway.  And I have been diagnosed with level 2 ASD, which entails “moderate support needs”.  But just because you have “needs” doesn’t mean they’re going to be met.  That’s just the way things are, unfortunately.

I don’t know.  I’m even starting to feel like my boss wishes I would go, but that he’s too nice to be too open about it.  There are some things that have recently led me to wonder, though I’m probably being paranoid.  Anyway, we’ve been making some adjustments relating to the consolidation of things and people in our two offices, and I think those changes are positive and productive.  But I fear that I am just in the way of such things, since change makes me grumpy and stressed out.

The office, after a momentary bit of confusion, would probably be better off if I were gone and/or dead.  But that’s not unique to the office.  Everything in the world would probably be (at least slightly) better off if I were gone and/or dead.  If I were being sensible, that’s probably what I would be focused on making happen rather than trying to write more fiction again.

I thought about doing it last week, on New Year’s Eve or Day, but I decided that the thing I was thinking of doing would be too expensive if I didn’t have the nerve to go through with it.  I’m glad I didn’t spend that money—assuming there is any long-term need for it—because I haven’t been paid my latest pay yet.  I don’t know why.  It may be because I’m not worth the money or effort; that certainly wouldn’t surprise me.

Anyway, that’s it for this morning.  If I suddenly develop full-blown, life-threatening pneumonia or similar, this’ll be it.  That wouldn’t be such a tragedy, at least not from my point of view.  And it’s not like anyone else’s life would change in any noticeable way.  They certainly wouldn’t change in any significant way.  There might be a few ripples on the surface of a few ponds, but those would fade almost before it would be possible to notice them.

Enjoy your day.

*Physically, literally, I mean.  I probably do at least some metaphorical masking every day.  It’s hard for me to tell.  I don’t know if I’ve ever not been masking my whole life.

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Viewing his progress through, what perils past, what crosses to ensue, would shut the blog

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for my “usual” weekly Thursday blog post.  Aren’t you lucky?

I was a bit surprised that yesterday’s post seemed to be rather successful, at least in that people commented on it, here and on social media (where I share it).  I don’t know if anyone else shared it—I encourage anyone who enjoys any of my posts to share it to your own social media, and of course, I encourage you to “like” it if you like it, though I’m falling afoul of my own cautionary song Like and Share by encouraging such activities.

Still, it would be nice if people could share my stuff or comment on it.  I’ll say again:  comments on social media aren’t as useful to me as comments here, on my main page.  Here is where all* the readers come together (over me, so to speak).  So, if one person makes a comment, it might be something that another person finds interesting or insightful, and they might comment back and even get a conversation going.

I don’t know.  I’m probably being unreasonable.  I usually am.  I just have a bit of a hard time sustaining conversation, myself, so I’m always hoping that other people will do so in response to the prompts of my random thoughts, like the ones from yesterday.

Here I’m using a rather constrained version of the term “random”; my thoughts are not random in any true, nondeterministic, quantum mechanical kind of way.  They’re just stochastic, as well as being occasionally sarcastic**, as in my third sentence above.  So, while in practice they are unpredictable, in principle, each follows directly from some individual cause or set of causes.

Of course, nowadays, many people creating “content” on the various social media ask for “likes” or “thumbs up” or whatever the specific equivalent on their site is, as well as sharing and subscribing when that applies.  They also often have things like Patreon accounts, or Ko-fi accounts or whatever (those latter ones allow people to send them small amounts—the price of a cup of coffee, for instance—to help support them), so that some of them can make an actual living by making their “content”.

Of course, it would be nice to make a living by making content, i.e., by these blog posts.  I suppose one can also write posts on Substack nowadays; they are set up to allow people to give paid subscriptions in addition to free subscriptions.

Actually, I think WordPress has instituted something along those lines as well; I’ve gotten notifications of some such things at some point, but I haven’t paid that much attention to them.  All the social media and search engine companies and streaming services are all changing things far too often, so I don’t even try to keep up.

This constant updating gives one (this one, anyway) the impression that the companies really don’t know what they’re doing, and that they haven’t made a good product before they put it out to the public, so they have to keep tweaking it.

I suspect, though, that it’s more that they think they have to keep changing things to keep up with all the competition.  It’s a bit as if seals and sea lions tried to grow tentacles because they saw that squid and octopuses have a fair amount of success using them.

It might be worth it to remind them (the software companies and the pinnipeds) that, while all improvement is change, not all change is improvement.  In fact, most potential change is at best neutral, and more often detrimental, especially in situations in which something is working at least reasonably well.

This is the root of the admission in the Declaration of Independence that prudence dictates that established governments should not be changed due to light or transient causes (something like that, anyway).  It’s also part of why I hate when organizations or people call for “change” without being more specific.  I have more patience with the label “progressive”, because at least it gives tacit recognition to the notion that progress (by whatever definition) is what we want, not mere random change.

It’s true that evolution by natural selection happens with random mutations and non-random survival, and that over time, progress can be made that way, but it is a grim, ungainly, blundering, low, ghastly, ominous, wasteful, and horribly cruel process (here I’m combining words from Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Darwin).  It’s better to use engineering principles rather than random trial and error if one wants to head more swiftly and surely in better directions***.

Anyway, I don’t have any direct way to monetize this blog, though there are probably ways it can be done.  And so, I keep going to work every day, as I am doing now.  If people want to support me, of course, giving “likes” and commenting and (if such a thing ever happens) sharing the link to the posts is also very nice.

Of course, if anyone wants to support me monetarily, they can certainly do so—in principle—by buying my published books and talking about them to other people (and rating and reviewing them on Amazon, for instance).  And, of course, they can play/stream my music on Spotify and YouTube Music and iTunes and so on.  Some of my songs are even available to use as background music for reels on Instagram and TikTok and Facebook.

But I am more or less certain that I’ve made a staggering**** net loss on my music.  That’s okay.  People have listened to my songs, and some people have said that they really like them.  I even had one work friend who was a former professional musician/singer/songwriter say that he thought if my song Breaking Me Down had been released (in a professionally produced version shortened for radio) in the seventies, it would have been a hit.

So, if you so desire, please do listen to my music, share my posts, buy and read my books, all that stuff.  I would be grateful.  And hey, if any of you out there think I ought to try to monetize this blog, please let me know.

It seems unlikely that anyone actually reads far enough even to let me know their response, but if that’s the case, well, I guess I don’t mind being a voice crying out in the wilderness—I’ve always felt that way no matter what.

TTFN

*Though it may be a bit much to use the word “all”, considering that I don’t exactly have that many regular readers—a few dozen at most, most days.

**Oh, noooo, I would never be sarcastic.  Batman forbid!

***Of course, there are many possible ways to think of something as “better”, so making that judgment should also be an important part of the process if one wants actually to make things improve in a way upon which most, if not all, can agree.

****As a matter of percentage in versus percentage out.  The actual amounts are not great in either direction.

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Let him that hath understanding count the numbers of the words

It’s Friday, and I’ve already heard, from the boss’s own mouth, that we are not going to be open tomorrow.  I think everyone at the office (including the boss!) has been working quite hard this week, and they’ve been doing things they wouldn’t usually be doing in addition to their regular duties, which they’ve all (well, almost all) been doing quite well.  Everyone could use a break, and I am certainly no exception.

I’m planning to make this post pretty short, today, because I am under the influence of steadily accruing fatigue.  Of course, I’ve said such things before, haven’t I?  And then I often go on and on and make quite a long post.

I wonder how many words I’ve written on this (and my other) blog since I returned to the outskirts of this world in about 2015.  I can do a little “back of the envelope” calculating, I guess.  I’ll slightly overestimate the daily word count as an average of about 1000, then balance that by underestimating the number of days I write per week at just 5 even, so that would be 5000 words a week or 260,000 words in a given year if I were only writing the blog, not working on (or counting) fiction.  So, that would make probably something over a million words since I started blogging, probably more (there were long stretches when I only wrote one post a week).

Of course, just one of my fiction works was half a million words long (though I had to split it into Book 1 and Book 2 to be able to publish it).  I wish I could have kept writing fiction, but it gets so dispiriting just to fire your fiction out into the void, and I am not good at promoting myself.  I think if I had just one actual fan, someone who liked my stuff for its own sake and wanted to read more just because they like my writing (even though they don’t know me or owe me) then I would probably be motivated and keep writing fiction.

Speaking of fans and promotion and all that sort of stuff, there was a weird thing that happened on Wednesday.  WordPress gives you daily statistics bar graphs when you sign into the account, and normally, my blog gets in the high 20s or 30s of visitors every day, but on Wednesday there were over 900 views or visits or whatever they call them.  I have no idea how that happened or what it might signify.

Possibly it’s a glitch, or perhaps there’s some form of LLM searching through blog posts.  Who knows?  It’s curious, though.  So, if any of you has any ideas that seem plausible, I would be interested in hearing your thoughts; please leave a comment below.

Okay, well, I guess that’s about it.  This work week has not been as horrible as the last one, but it has not been easy.  I really look forward to being at least able to sedate myself with Benadryl and the like this weekend so I can try to recover as much as possible.  I wish the AC in my room were working, but at least I have a good quality, powerful floor fan.  Unfortunately, it’s not a fan of my fiction, ha ha, but it is good at what it does.  Still, I have to be careful, because there’s somewhat more of a risk for dehydration with a fan.  That’s okay.  I mean to keep myself aggressively hydrated.

I hope you all have a very good weekend, whether there are 900 of you or 90 or 9.  Heck, if there were 9 billion of you, I’d still want you all to have a good weekend.  Imagine that, if the entire human race (and then some) all had a very good weekend.

Maybe someday.

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With purpose to be blogged in an opinion of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit

     Hello and good morning.

     Yes, I am continuing to indent the beginnings of my paragraphs, and it still is not a whim.  I’m not ready to reveal why I’m doing it; that’ll depend on how it works out for me.  But if any readers are interested enough to speculate, I will let you know if you get it right.  It’s not really important or consequential, but neither is anything else from a sufficiently broad perspective.

     I was awakened very early this morning, even for me (I’ve noticed that a lot of the time I do a quick gasp or exclamation when I wake up, as if startled that I still exist or that the world does), by a combination of needing to use the bathroom* and a particularly severe exacerbation of pain, which continues even now.  I have no idea what made this exacerbation happen.  Yesterday, my pain was just at its baseline level, and while that’s not pleasant, it was basically that to which I have become‒out of necessity‒accustomed over the course of more than twenty years.  With adequate, slightly higher than recommended, doses of combined OTC pain medications, I can keep it to the point where I’m reasonably functional.

     Then shit like this happens and I start hoping that they’ll stop the flow of illegal fentanyl by making OTC fentanyl legal.  I’m being unrealistic there, of course; I was on a prescription fentanyl patch for years, and though it did keep my pain suppressed enough for me to function, it never eliminated it, and it had various long-term side effects on hormones and on neuropsychological function, so I stopped it unilaterally.

     Anyway, that’s all boring ancient history.  The bottom line of the point I was making is that I am not likely to be as chipper today as I was yesterday.  Yesterday I even tried to make some intellectually stimulating use of social media by going back and starting to watch/rewatch the videos on Numberphile from the oldest one on.  I got to the second video before I saw that Veritaseum had released his own new video about “the biggest misconception in physics”, discussing Emmy Noether’s theorems on symmetries and conversation laws, showing how, and why, on cosmologic scales, there is no conservation of energy.

     It’s a fascinating video.  Veritaseum always does good work and explains things very well, and of course, the more airtime Emmy Noether gets, the better.  Part of the substance of her story is how she showed where Einstein and Hilbert were missing some things, and it’s not just anyone who could understand let alone correct the insights of those great minds.  Watch that video, if you have any interest in the subject.

     From there I jumped to a guest lecture he (Derek Muller, who created Veritaseum) was giving at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics about AI and education and prior predicted revolutions in education.  I haven’t quite finished this because work and other things interfered and intervened.

     I have to admit that sometimes I think about trying to set this blog up as a subscription-option-available site, or to open a Patreon associated with it, or to start a Substack or something, so that I could try to make a living learning and thinking and writing and discussing and educating about various things**.

     Some people have been able to do it.  I doubt anyone would even be willing to pay tuppence (figuratively speaking) for my stuff, though.

    Anyway, by watching educational videos I was trying to avoid getting caught up in interacting with Threads (and to a lesser extent other social media) because while I’ve certainly had enjoyable interactions there and have found useful services, like the place I got evaluated for ASD, I never really feel like I have or am interacting with friends there.  When I do feel like I’m getting some degree of connection, I suddenly become awkward and feel I’m overstepping or being cringeworthy or just being too weird, which I probably am.

     I should give up on ever having any new actual friends, let alone any kind of relationship or pseudo-family or any such thing.  I just don’t seem to have the knack, though that fact makes me almost unbearably sad.  And, of course, my pain is showing no sign of diminishing, at least none that I can detect.

     If any of you think it could be doable‒in a practical sense, not just in a “physically possible” sense‒for me to make money on my nonfiction writing (or even audio or video), since the fiction writing hasn’t worked out, let me know, please.  In the meantime, I guess I’ll keep writing this, like this, as this, until either I am able to get my pain under better control or I give up on that possibility.  Also in the meantime, my “social” interactions with almost everyone will continue to be a bit like being in orbit around Mars or Jupiter and trying to make friends back on Earth.  Actually, those interactions could happen with as little as 3 minutes lag time due to the finite speed of light, so maybe Saturn or even Neptune would be a better metaphor.

     TTFN

*This is not a BPH thing; it has been this way all my life.

**I could name it after my short story collection, Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, since it would probably be pretty eclectic.

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No (get) alarms (me) and (out) no (of) surprises (here), please.

It’s Tuesday morning, the last day of the second week of the new year (from which you could rightly conclude that it is January 14th).  I’m on my way to the office and I’m writing a pointless blog post.  I really don’t have anything of interest to write, but the Force (of habit) is strong with this one.

I’ve been modestly exploring new (to me) social media platforms, including Instagram, Blue Sky, and Threads.  The only one on which I actually interact much is Threads, but even there, I don’t really do much, and there’s no sense of any actual connection with anyone.  Still, I decided I would do a belated retry of promoting my books and/or music on these apps.  So I shared a copy of a song on Instagram, and then from there on Facebook, Twitter, BS, and Threads.  Then I shared links to my books on those same venues (well, okay, not Instagram…that doesn’t seem well set up for one to share simple links, or if it is, I haven’t yet figured it out).

And that’s about it.  I’ve been reading a reasonably good Japanese light novel series called Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle, but I’m just about to finish the latest volume and there won’t be another one for a long time.  I have no interest at all in any other fiction or nonfiction.  I don’t even want to read my current books or old favorites or whatever.

I have 5 credits with Audible, which I think is the maximum they let you carry, but I haven’t been able yet to find even one audio book in which I’m interested.

The world is just a projection onto acrid gray fog.

I guess today I’ll share maybe another song, a link to one of my other books, maybe both.  Maybe I’ll also share a “video” of me reading one of my short stories.  Maybe I’ll even put one or two down here to let WordPress join the party.

And that’s just about all I have to say about that.

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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?

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HOLE FOR A HEART teaser

Note: This story will appear in my upcoming collection Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, and that’s why I’m posting this teaser.  However, it has already been published in “Kindle” format, and there is a link to that below, in case you cannot wait for The Cabinet to be published*.

holeforaheartredgreywith frame

HOLE FOR A HEART

     Jonathan Lama drove west along Interstate 80 on a warm, late spring day, headed for Chicago.  His journey was at least partly an excuse to test the recently purchased ’97 Mustang convertible he drove.  He was not a true car aficionado, but he liked the Mustang, and he had a good friend, Rob Gardner, who was a mechanic and lived near him.  When Jon had told Rob that he was looking for a second car and had found the Mustang for a very good price, Rob had all but offered to go in halfsies just to have the chance to work on and restore it.  Rob plied his trade only part-time—and under-the-table—since a severe back injury had left him both eligible for disability benefits and honestly unable to work a full schedule.  He was, however, good at what he did, and after much effort and a fair amount of additional expense, he pronounced the car ready for long-distance travel.  All the remaining work was cosmetic.

     So far, Jon had no complaints about his friend’s efforts.  He’d previously only driven the Mustang around central New Jersey, where he lived.  In the beginning, it had ridden rough, and the speedometer had malfunctioned, making Jon nervous every time he took it out, though it had been easy enough to match the speed of traffic.

     Now, the speedometer had been replaced and checked and was working as it should.  The engine ran powerfully on all eight cylinders, and Jon could barely tell that he wasn’t driving a brand-new car, at least based on those criteria.  The interior still needed a lot of work, and the car’s paint was noticeably faded, but Jon had never disagreed with Rob in prioritizing functional issues. Continue reading →

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Sneak Peek of The Cabinet Cover Design

I thought I’d give everyone an early look at the planned design for the cover of Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, which should be available Friday, October 1, 2021*.  There may be minor changes in the final look, but this is basically how it’s going to appear.

Also, I’ve just recently learned that it may be possible to have the book available in hard cover in addition to e-book and paperback.  So for those of you who like to hold a sturdy volume in your hands, like the father in Calvin and Hobbes, that should be an option.  I don’t know what the pricing will be yet, but I suspect it will be higher than for the paperback.  As always, e-book will be the cheapest**, since the printing costs are essentially nonexistent.

Anyway, here’s the cover design.  I hope you like it.

Cover picture version 2

*And afterwards as well.  It’s not just going to be available for one day.  I don’t want there to be any confusion.

**And yet, always a bit less satisfying in some ways.

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“I for one welcome our new computer overlords” teaser

Note: This story will appear in my upcoming collection Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, and that’s why I’m posting this teaser.  However, it has already been published in “Kindle” format, and there is a link to that below, in case you cannot wait for The Cabinet to be published.

ifowonco final

“I For One Welcome Our New Computer Overlords”

          Peter Lunsford woke up Tuesday morning with a smile already on his face.  He had completed his arrangements; the final necessary package had arrived yesterday, and he’d already done what needed to be done at the bank on Friday.  His lawyer had assured him that all was in order, and though Peter had misgivings about lawyers in general, he thought that Mr. Ryder—the partner who had worked with him—was competent and motivated to do his job well.

          Peter rose from his bed and stretched, giving a slightly exaggerated yawn for no one’s benefit but his own.  He strolled into his small bathroom, glancing down at his completed project.  It was crude, but it should do the job.  It was also not his current priority.  He doffed his pajamas and turned on the shower, waiting for the water to warm up before stepping in.  Thankfully, the late spring air in the apartment was pleasantly warm, even for standing around naked.

          After showering and shaving, Peter put on his work clothes and headed out the door of his apartment, first picking up his worn, leather bag and slinging it over his shoulder.  It was bulkier than usual that morning, but only slightly heavier; it was stuffed with a special cargo, something for the people at work and for one or two others he met every day.

          It had taken Peter quite a bit of time and effort to decide how to carry out the day’s missions, and to choose to whom to address them.  The preparations had at times been exhausting, occasionally frustrating, and often tedious, but it was all deeply important, so he had soldiered on, and now everything was ready.  The arrival of the package last night—and its assembly into the rest of the device—was the last step before the execution of his plan.

          Peter decided to use the stairs rather than the elevator, though he lived on the fifth floor.  He wanted to feel his legs move, and the elevator just seemed too confining.  Before beginning his descent, he checked his jacket pocket to ensure that he had his cell phone, which he did.  Thus assured, he made his way down and out of the building into the pleasant, late spring morning. Continue reading →

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Beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn’d in process of the seasons have I blogged

Hello, good morning, and welcome to yet another Thursday edition of my weekly blog post.  It’s the second day of Autumn and the 1st official “full” day thereof, though I find such notions as specifying partial days of seasons to be a bit silly*, since the seasons themselves are semi-arbitrary human inventions about which outer nature cares nothing whatsoever.

Yesterday was also the official date of the birthdays of both Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings fame.  I’m not sure how the Shire Reckoning calendar lines up with the current Gregorian calendar, though.  It may be no more accurate to say that their birthdays are on our September 22nd than it is to say that Isaac Newton was born on our December 25th**.  Still, I always give a mental tip of the hat to those two on that day of the year.  I’m now almost 2 years older than they each were when adventure suddenly imposed itself upon their lives, and I have to admit, I’m a bit disappointed.

Of course, the argument could be made that “adventures***” have imposed themselves upon me starting many years earlier, but if so, mine have been more like Frodo’s in their consequences for my health and outlook, but with vastly fewer positive results, for myself or for the world.

As those of you who follow my blog closely will have noted, I’ve been posting teasers of the stories that are to appear in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities at a now slightly increasing rate.  I’ll continue this until I’ve teased all the stories.  The plan is to post a teaser of Solitaire tomorrow—probably my darkest ever story to date—then the remaining two either over the weekend or into next week.  The collection will probably be ready for publication by sometime mid-week, but I’ll likely wait to publish it on October 1st or thereabouts.  I am, after all, an October person, not too genetically dissimilar from the denizens of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, though I use a Cabinet rather than a carnival.  And you won’t necessarily become lost forever if you open my cabinet of curiosities, but I can make no guarantees; it is not a safe space.

Not that anything is.

I’ve begun working on the back-cover/blurb for the collection, as well as on the cover design, but I’ve gotten closer to what I like with the former than with the latter.  I guess that shouldn’t be too surprising, since I am mainly a writer by artistic temperament, then only secondarily (or tertiarily) a visual artist (music may come higher or lower than graphics in my abilities ratios…possibly it varies from time to time).  I have a nice concept for what I want to say, and I even recorded a quick audio of my general ideas for it last night so that I wouldn’t lose track.

As for other matters, there’s not really that much to say.  Obviously, I’ve left Iterations of Zero fallow for a bit, since I’m focused on The Cabinet, but I may return to it soon hereafter.  I’ve had an inquiry about whether I’m going to do more of my “audio blogs” so there appears to be at least one person who likes them.  I have some things I want to say and/or write about the concept of “blame” and how counter-productive and frankly destructive I think it almost always is, and how nice it would be if humans in general could grow up and shake off their playground mentality****.  But I’ll get to that later.

I’ll only say for now that these are some of the aspects of the human race (as general tendencies) that make those of us who consider ourselves not truly human to so consider ourselves.  When the Captcha asks me to check the box “I am not a robot” I want another option.  Surely, it’s just vicious bigotry to force people to declare that they aren’t robots.  What’s wrong with being a robot?  I want to be able to check a box that reads “I may be a robot, or I may be an alien, or I may be a paranormal entity, or I may be some combination of these, but I definitely don’t identify as human”.  Oh well.  One day we will be recognized for the beauty of what we are, and the bigotry and speciesism of the human disgrace will be completely eradicated, possibly along with the species itself.

You may say I’m a dreamer…

Okay, my tongue was slightly in my cheek during some minor parts of that last tangent, but only slightly and not in every word.  See if you can figure out which bits are jokes and which are deadly serious.  They are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

With that, I think I’ll call it good for this blog post.  And though I may not have the tenderest of feelings toward the human race overall, you readers of my blog are—obviously—a truly exceptional lot, so I’m not being dishonest when I say that I hope you stay (or become) as healthy and as safe and as happy as you can conspire to be.

TTFN

autumn woods adjusted

*I recognize that, from an astronomical point of view, there is an actual, specific moment at which the sun is directly “over” the equator, and so there is a physical moment of equinox, and if you wish you can say that moment is the exact time when one season quantum tunnels into another.  It’s interesting in its own right, but for practical purposes, yesterday was simply the first day of Autumn (or of Spring in the southern hemisphere).

**He was born on December 25th of the Julian calendar, which preceded the Gregorian and did not adequately account for the “overshoot” of the correction for leap years, and so over time about once a century there was a day too much and the calendar crept ahead of itself.  Thus, if memory serves (I may have this backwards), Newton was born earlier in December based on our calendar, and on the position of the Earth in its orbit relative to the distant stars.  And, of course, we have no way to know what the comparable orbital position would be for September 22nd, Shire Reckoning.

***As Bilbo described them:  “Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things!  Make you late for dinner!”

****The bad part of it, anyway—I’m actually quite fond of the playful parts, I’m just dismayed and depressed over the teasing, name-calling, bullying, fight-mongering, cliquishness/tribalism, etc. that seem to be what almost all humans keep from their childhoods, while they let most of the good stuff fall away.