Here is the audio recording I did this morning because I didn’t feel like typing anything. As you will hear (if you listen) I am not really feeling very upbeat, even for me. Sorry. I don’t know if I have anything at all interesting to say. If I do, well…enjoy, I guess.
audio
Stories and simulated universes and Laplace’s Demon and related stuff
Here are just some thoughts I spoke out loud this morning because I didn’t feel like writing. They took a surprising course, but I hope they might be interesting. Please let me know what you think.
Here are some links to my stories/books to which I referred in this audio blog.
Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities
And here’s the home page for Nick Bostrum, a very smart philosopher (he’s younger than I am! I didn’t realize that before).
And here’s the link to Sean Carroll’s podcast, which I readily recommend.
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Thoughts on confident statements about scientific fallibility
This is some audio I recorded this morning trying to follow up on the subject I brought up near the end of my last “audio blog”. It relates to overconfidence about scientific pronouncements and so on both by the experts and by those who think they know the “real” motivations of the experts, particularly relating to the issues in the pandemic and so on. It was triggered by a snippet of a conversation between Bill Maher and Seth MacFarlane, but I’m not sure where to find the original snippet.
As you will note, I did NOT make it shorter than my last audio.
[There is an interruption in the middle–presaged and followed by three chirps–in which I say what I had meant to say upon bringing up a particular subject, but then distracted myself completely by discussing some excellent YouTube channels about science and math.]
Here are some links to the YouTube channels I mentioned (along with one or two I did not) and which distracted me. I heartily endorse them:
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Time and the hour blog through the roughest day
Hello and good morning. Welcome to another Thursday, a reminder that you’ve survived for yet another week. Congratulations! You’ve earned the chance to read yet another edition of my weekly blog.
I’ve been thinking about the recurrent and ongoing desire I have to reinvigorate Iterations of Zero, my “other” blog, in which I range over a wider…well, range of topics, many of them darker than what I address here. I tend to keep this blog, the one you’re reading, focused on my creative writing (books and short stories) and on music when that comes up (though that also appears on IoZ).
One of the biggest obstacles to IoZ is that I imagine that I should write about planned and specific topics there. When I write this weekly blog, I don’t plan it in advance. I just write whatever comes out, rather in the way that people have conversations*, and it seems to work nicely. So, what I intend to try is not to plan what I’m going to write in Iterations of Zero, but simply start writing as I do here, and see what comes out. Hopefully, I won’t start channeling ancient Lemurians or some similar such nonsense. I can think of it almost as a kind of free-association psychotherapy…except that I can’t really do it while lying on a leather “couch”.
This won’t clear away every barrier to posting in IoZ. One of its other main obstacles is time. I don’t want to sacrifice another weekday morning that could be spent working on my books, since I already miss one of the those a week doing what you’re reading now. And, despite my exhortations for all of you to send me lots of money so I can become independently wealthy and write full-time, I still have to work for a living, and to commute (yes, I’m back in the office full-time now), so my free time is woefully limited.
I’ve tried various means to get around that problem, including buying a Bluetooth keyboard for my cell phone so I can write blog posts there. It’s a nifty little gizmo, and it does its job nicely, but it hasn’t seemed to make me any more likely to use my spare moments to write. I’m much more prone to use them to read blog posts and to check various news and science sites. I guess I’m going to have to bite the bullet and just tell myself to write something—anything—every Sunday, which is the one day I never use to work on my books**. We’ll see how it works out, but it can be soooo hard to kick myself into gear on Sundays.
Now, to abruptly shift gears and address another potential time sink: I’ve been considering restarting audio recordings of some of my work. I have a few published short stories for which I haven’t recorded audio (and thus haven’t posted to YouTube), and of course I only reached Chapter 9 of The Chasm and the Collision before deciding that not enough people were following it to make it worthwhile***.
However, there is real, personal, ego-syntonic joy in reading my stories aloud and posting them for people to listen if they want. Doing so in the past also helped me learn how to use Audacity, which led to me being able to record and produce my original songs, which is double-plus-good. So, what I think I may do is put out a few posts here with links/embedding of my short stories’ audio “videos” (one post) and chapters of CatC (another post) to give you all an easy place to link to them, to see if I get any new listens, and to elicit any comments in favor of or against me doing further recordings.
It might also be nice to do a post embedding my song “videos” as well, since I have little bits and pieces of the beginnings of various others bouncing about on paper and in my head and might be pushed toward or away from further efforts by reader/listener response. But that’s mainly orthogonal to the preceding point.
As for much more important matters, Unanimity continues to draw nearer to its final form. I’m within a few hundred pages of the end of the penultimate edit! That might not sound like much, but in a half-a-million-word novel, believe me, it’s getting close to the end. Of course, the final run-through will be the hardest work since the original writing of the book, but the excitement of being near completion should easily keep me going. Hopefully, I’ll be able to spread a little of that excitement to all of you. There are worse contagions to catch, as we all know.
With that, I’ll call this week’s blog installment good and move on to other things. I hope you’re all well, and that you stay well and become even better over time for as long as you are able.
TTFN
*Some of you may say that this fact is obvious based on the quality of this weekly blog. You really know how to hurt a guy.
**There’s nothing religious about this; Sunday is just the one day of every week that I never go to official work. For that reason, it’s also the day I do my laundry, and I can guarantee that there is nothing religious about that process.
***I honestly don’t understand this. I know I’m biased, but I really love that story—and others have told me they love it also and have thanked me for writing it—and I think that I narrate it well. Oh, well.
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I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; For now hath time made me his numbering blog
Hello, all. It’s Thursday again, despite our best efforts, and time for another blog post—the first of a new month.
I have now, officially, released my song, “Schrodinger’s Head” in mixed and recorded form—or whatever the proper terminology is—onto Iterations of Zero, as well as onto YouTube, and that’s good. It’s been an interesting experience, but it took up a lot of my time for the last few weeks, compulsively, so I’ve done no new audio blogs or written postings on IoZ, nor have I done much in the way of editing on either Unanimity or on Free-range Meat. Now that the music has…well, if not died, then has at least been released into the wild, I can get back to more usual things, and anyone who has been waiting for my stories eventually to come out can breathe a sigh of relief. I doubt there is such a person, but just in case…
Work on my novella—for which I still don’t have a final title—has continued all along. I wasn’t going to let anything take me away from that, since my new writing has to be always my primary commitment. The story’s going well so far, all things considered. I like the characters, which is a plus, but this usually means—given the way my stories tend to go—that they’re in for some hard times. Oh, well.
I’m still struggling with the conundrum of whether to keep doing audio blogs for Iterations of Zero, or to try to switch back to doing written blogs (with the difficulties that presents) or just saying “to Hell with it” and not waste any more time on either one unless and until the mood strikes me. This latter notion, though, tends to be a pipe dream. For a writer, in my experience at least, waiting until the mood strikes is comparable to waiting for an asteroid impact. It will happen eventually…but you’ll probably be waiting longer than any human lifetime.
Well, that’s about all I have to say about that this week. I could harp on about some random, walk-in topic and try to be funny, but even I find that sort of thing unbearably stupid a lot of the time, so I can’t imagine how it must seem to all of you. I wish you, and all manner of other sentient beings, well.
TTFN
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‘Sblog, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?
Good morning! Welcome to the last Thursday of March 2019.
Back in the day, I would have written an episode of “My Heroes Have Always Been Villains” on such a day, but for reasons inexplicable to me, those posts were never popular, and they’re unlikely ever to become a regular thing again. This makes me sad, but there’s not much I can do about it.
For those of you who’ve been waiting for more “audio blog” entries on Iterations of Zero, don’t get discouraged, even though all I’ve posted there this week were two cheesy recordings of me playing guitar and singing Pink Floyd songs. I’ll return to the audio blogs, probably by next week, but there are reasons for my diversion.
It all started (as the cliché goes) when I was playing guitar and singing Radiohead’s “How to Disappear Completely” in my room at home, and for fun I decided to record it on my cell phone. I was honestly surprised by the sound quality when I listened to it. This set my wheels spinning, which can be a perilous thing.
I have a fair amount of experience using sound editing software because of the audio I’ve done of my own stories. I decided to play around with it, and with the surprisingly good smartphone audio; I recorded and mixed the chords, then the vocals, for “Pigs on the Wing” (Part 1). It came out rather well, I thought, despite my mediocre guitar playing.
Thus encouraged, I decided to do something slightly more complicated. I recorded three separate parts for “Wish You Were Here,” which is a nice song to do because the guitar automatically sounds pretty, even though it’s not too difficult for a fumbling amateur.
The point of all this, really, was to practice recording before using the software and my two good electric guitars, to work on my own original creation. As you may know, a while back I posted the lyrics of a song called “Schrodinger’s Head,” which I’d written on a whim after joking around with a coworker about possible band names and first albums. Since then, I worked out the song’s melody and chord structure (this isn’t difficult, so don’t be impressed) during my regular goofing around on guitar. Once I knew that I could make pretty darn good recordings using my very ordinary smartphone, and since I had audio software to clean up and mix those recordings…well, I realized that I could—with my cell phone, with a laptop and/or desktop computer, and with my guitar(s) and practice amps—do what would have required lots of expensive studio time and even more expensive equipment back when The Beatles and Pink Floyd were making their greatest works. I can’t match their musical skills and genius, obviously, but I can, thanks to five decades’ worth of improved technology, do by my lonesome something that could never have been done in the past.
What I have done is to put together rhythm guitar tracks, an intro lead guitar riff, and main vocals for my song. I’ll be adding other tracks, including more lead guitar, a possible “bass” line, maybe some backup vocals, and whatnot, and I’ll let you hear the result (on Iterations of Zero) when it’s finished. A few select people—close friends and/or family—have heard what I have so far, and reviews have been encouraging.
Don’t worry; I’m not going to quit my day job.
I’m also not going to quit writing, and I have not slowed down on that. My novella, which will ultimately lose the title Safety Valve, is coming along steadily, and it continues to surprise me with its weight. I wrote a scene in it this week that drew from own few experiences of sleep paralysis, and that writing process evoked some of the terror I felt on those occasions, even though I was writing in a brightly lit office. I hope that at least some of that feeling comes across for the reader in the final product.
Editing, unfortunately, has not been going as quickly as it ought to on either Unanimity or Free-Range Meat. The latter isn’t such a huge problem, since it’s a truly short story, and should thus be relatively short work. Unanimity, however, nearly meets the description from “Paperback Writer”: “It’s a thousand pages, give or take a few.” I really need to pick up the pace, or it’s going to be a looooong time before it’s ready to publish.
I wish I could devote more time to all this and not need to work to earn my living. If anyone out there has a big chunk of money they don’t need, and that they’d like to give me so I can write and do other creative things full time, please get in touch. In the meantime, the rest of you, do please let others know about my writing and my books, if you enjoy them. And do please rate and review mine and other people’s works when you get the chance. It really makes a difference.
With that, I think I’ve written enough here this week. April, Come She Will—before the next time I post here—and I wish you a happy April Fool’s Day in advance.
TTFN
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This blog of darkness I acknowledge mine.
For those of you who follow this blog regularly, you’ll probably be relieved to read that this will almost certainly be the last time I’m going to write, “work on Unanimity is proceeding well.” As predicted, I should be finished with the first draft of that novel by this time next week, barring illness and/or accident. It’s been a long haul, and though the editing and rewriting that follows will surely be a laborious task, at least this stage will be finished. It is, by far, the longest book that I’ve ever written.
In a similar vein, you may also be pleased to learn that I won’t be speaking much more about Penal Colony*, for that story is all but ready to be published. It may well be available by this time next week. In many ways it’s a much lighter-hearted tale than Unanimity, to say nothing of being shorter, but it deals with a few of the same themes and ideas—namely the possibility of insidious threats to personal autonomy, and the possibly illusory nature of such a thing in the first place.
Don’t worry, though, if you don’t like to deal with serious ideas or themes when you read a story. I’m no highbrow literatus at heart, however much I love Shakespeare. One of the problems I often had with literature courses in college was that I never had the knack—or perhaps the interest—for trying to dissect works of fiction for deep meanings and hidden messages. I just read stories to enjoy them. With Shakespeare, at least, I’m darn near sure he wrote to entertain people. This explains why I tended to get better grades in Calculus, Chemistry, Biology, and Physics than in English courses. You didn’t have to try to figure out how to say something the professor thought was insightful, or that agreed with his or her personal take on a given work. In math and science, if you know the material, you pretty much can get the right answer.
So, you don’t need to worry about my stories being unnecessarily complicated or deep. I do, of course, tend automatically to put into them whatever I’m pondering at any given time, as I suspect any author does, and in real life I’ve been told that I tend to invite chaos. But chaos can make for good stories. It’s an odd fact of human nature, but things we like to read, or to watch, or the games we like to play, are rarely what most of us would ever want to experience if we could avoid them. This has been said, and far better, by many others before me.
I plan on taking most of the month of February off from any editing or rewriting Unanimity, following Stephen King’s advice in his book On Writing. We’ll see if I can meet that ideal; I make no guarantees. If I’m able, though, it means that next month will be one in which I can dedicate myself entirely to new stories. I have one or two works of short fiction that I hope to finish in that time. Then will begin the proverbial wading-through-blood of making Unanimity fit to be read by other people.
It’s gonna be a while before that’s done.
In other news: I’m always trying to think of ways to make my parallel blog—Iterations of Zero—work for me and with my schedule, and I may try something new with it. I’m a fan of a few podcasts, and I am also an enthusiastic consumer of Audible books, especially nonfictions ones. My own commute-based listening has convinced me that, however much I want to participate in, promote, and preserve the art and craft of written language, it may be useful to do more audio work, sharing thoughts and ideas that I’d planned eventually to turn into written blog posts. As you know, I’ve done audio (and associated “video”) of three of my short stories and nine chapters of CatC, and I’ve developed a modicum of skill at using the medium, so I may start posting some more audio stuff on IoZ…perhaps starting by reading aloud some posts I’ve written previously. Further bulletins on this as events develop.
Finally, a forewarning: I’m planning, hopefully sooner rather than later, to rewrite the “About Me” section of this blog. I wrote that piece many years ago now, and when I read it now, it just feels like I’m trying too hard. I also left out a fair few of the more unpleasant but pivotal things that have happened to me. I suppose this is understandable, even excusable, but I must remember my above-noted insight that unpleasant stories are often interesting to read. Mainly, though, I just want to be honest about myself, as much as I’m able, and anyone who’s read my fiction can probably tell that a jolly, happy-go-lucky Dr. Pangloss I am not.
Also, if one is open even about the most embarrassing aspects of one’s life, then one need not fear that those events can be used against one, even inadvertently. I’m in some ways fortunate that many of my most damaging personal tales are already matters of public record; my personal darkness is rather well-illuminated. If it contains the sorts of things that would drive you away from me if they were to be revealed later, then by all means, stay away now.
I am what I am, I’m my own special destruction.
But destruction and creation aren’t mutually exclusive, they’re just ways of looking at the processes of change. And at this stage of the universe, embroiled as we are in the long transition from order to entropy, change is something with which you’re just gonna have to deal. It doesn’t ask your permission, it doesn’t need your approval, and it will certainly never seek your forgiveness.
TTFN
Here’s a peek at the planned cover picture:
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Come what come may, time and the hour blogs through the roughest day.
Well, Thursday has caught me off-guard again. This really shouldn’t happen, considering that it comes every week at the same time—like clockwork, or at least like calendar-work—but I guess I’ve got a mental block in that area. The days do all seem much the same, with very little that stands out from its surroundings; certainly, there exist plain few inherently exciting events. Goodness knows the news cycle is too depressingly idiotic to vouchsafe much attention without losing IQ points each time; it’s probably worse for your brain than sniffing glue, though I’ve never tried the latter, and I don’t intend to do so. If glue-sniffing is worse than paying attention to popular and social media—well, then it is very bad indeed.
Of course, there are exciting things coming in my personal future. The writing of Unanimity proceeds well, with the story arcing gracefully (I hope) toward its climax, but it continues to be longer than I expect. I’m pretty sure the first draft is going to be over half a million words before it’s through! But I do expect it to be complete before the end of the year, and then rewriting/editing can begin, leading ultimately, in the fullness of time, to the release of the novel. So that’s fun.
I also finished rewriting the original portion of In the Shade, that short story I pulled out and decided to complete. I am not, however, going to finish writing the story until after I’ve completed at least the first draft of Penal Colony, which is going more quickly now that I’m not splitting my secondary writing time between it and In the Shade. I expect that both short stories will be complete, rewritten/edited, and released well before Unanimity is ready to go.
I have a tentative plan to put together a new collection of short stories before long, since I write them with some frequency, and release them as the equivalent of “Kindle Singles.” I know there are people out there who prefer to read physical, paper-and-ink books, and sympathize strongly with that point of view (though I do love being able to carry my library around in my pocket). Since publishing even my short stories (which tend to be long) in paperback individually just makes for a product that’s probably too expensive for what you get, I like the idea of releasing a new collection of stories, like Welcome to Paradox City, but with more stories than that collection. I’ve even started playing around with title ideas, like Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, or something along those lines.
And just now, literally, as I wrote this, it occurred to me that—going in the other direction—I could also publish the individual short stories from Welcome to Paradox City as Kindle additions. These would be The Death Sentence, If the Spirit Moves You, and of course the titular Paradox City. Interesting.
Of course, if I release these as individual works, it might be tempting to produce audio versions of the stories, which could be fun and rewarding, but which could reinstantiate the trap in which I use a lot of my spare time recording and editing. I really need to find a way to dedicate more of myself to writing, and its associated pursuits, in the rapidly diminishing (and highly unpredictable) life that remains to me. Maybe I should set up a Patreon account or something.
Discussing audio leads to an amusing little side-note. As I think I’ve commented before, I have a longish daily commute, and I like to listen to podcasts and audio books during the trip. Well, recently, I was fiddling through my phone and found the old, unedited recordings of some of my short stories and the early chapters of The Chasm and the Collision. I listened to one of these on the way home the other day, and it was quite amusing to hear all my mistakes and retakes, and the inevitable copious profanity that went along with them. But it was also surprisingly fun simply to listen to myself reading my stories, so last night I opened up the YouTube app on my phone and listened to the first part of Hole for a Heart on my way home. I don’t know if this is the most narcissistic thing that’s ever been done, but it certainly ranks right up there in my personal experience. It was, however, honestly enjoyable. I wonder what, if anything, that says about me, but it’s at least reassuring in that I still find the story to be a good one, and it makes me want to write more.
I just wish I could finish Unanimity more quickly. Sometimes I think I’m never going to live to see it published, or even to see the finished first draft. Probably that’s too melodramatic—I do tend to be a bit dark, but then again, if you read my writing, you know that already.
And that’s pretty much it for today, on this surprisingly unexpected Thursday. I hope I haven’t shortchanged you, but then again, if you enjoy my writing, there’s plenty of it available commercially.
TTFN!
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I’ll blog to thee in silence.
It’s Thursday again, and time for another of my weekly blog posts about my writing.
There’s not much new to discuss today, but there are a few updates for the imaginary reader who cares about such things. First, I think I’m going to take at least a temporary break from doing the audio for The Chasm and the Collision. I had been toying with that possibility for a while but had decided (yesterday) just to go ahead and do the next chapter. When I had finished the initial recording of the first portion of Chapter 10, though, I discovered that some technical problem had occurred during the recording. I don’t know exactly what caused it, but the playback sounded echoey and tinny, with uneven volume. I didn’t deviate in any obvious way from what I’ve done for the past two or three chapters (which were recorded by a different method from preceding chapters and audio stories), and I don’t see any way to salvage the recording and make it pleasant for the listener.
I’m not someone who thinks that the universe sends messages or omens to people in the real world, even though I write stories about the fantastical and the “supernatural,” but I nevertheless took this as a cue—accidental though it was—to take a break.
It’s not as though I think a lot of people have been listening to those stories or chapters, in any case. I haven’t received a single comment or any other feedback, either here on the blog or on any of the YouTube versions of the audio stories, so I doubt that a hiatus is going to bring heartbreak to any human. And I sincerely doubt that any non-human is listening to the stories or is capable of responding to them, so leaving the audio aside should obey the dictates of the Hippocratic Oath and do no harm.
I took two days off from writing this weekend, not for any deliberate reason, but the holiday here in America (Labor Day) contributed. The occurrence of a tropical storm (mild for South Florida, but still rainy and dreary for a long stretch of time), also dampened my enthusiasm. I guess, technically, I took three days off, now that I think about it, because I wrote the first draft of my latest post on Iterations of Zero last week, in response to something that I had seen. I just did the editing and rewriting on Tuesday morning, after which I carried out the recording debacle described above.
Then, yesterday, I wrote again on Unanimity, which was productive. I’m lucky enough to enter easily into a state of “flow” when I’m writing, especially when writing fiction, so even when I’m gloomy or tired, I’m at least able to produce something. Whether that product is good or not is probably highly debatable, but the audience of one that consists of me at least always finds it tolerable so far. So that’s good.
On a tangentially related matter, I recently started a trial of “promote mode” on Twitter, but I think I’m going to discontinue it. The idea was to try to get word about my books and audio and podcasts out to a greater number of people through that venue, but unfortunately promote mode is not discriminating. It “promotes” every tweet one twits, so one encounters such bizarre phenomena as when a tweet expressing a feeling of profound depression and discouragement becomes my most “liked” and “retweeted” post since I’ve been on the site. That’s not the boost I’m looking for. Also, to my surprise and disappointment, my number of followers on Twitter has dropped since I began the trial; I’m getting a net negative return on a not-insignificant investment. It may be that I should give the experiment more time, but it’s not as though I have money and Twitter followers to burn. I think I should probably just let things proceed and grow—if they in fact do—organically.
And with that, there’s not much else to say today. My wittiness, limited at the best of times, is in the lower reaches of its curve, so I’ll wait for an upward swerve before trying to put out anything more entertaining. I do hope you’re all well, and continue to be so, and if anything, that you get ever better over time.
TTFN
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The Chasm and the Collision, Chapter 9: “The Tree by the Lake” – the audio
Here it is, right on schedule: the audio for Chapter 9 of The Chasm and the Collision, read, as always, by me.
As always: You may feel free to listen, to download, and to share as often as you wish, by whatever means you wish, but you are not authorized to make any money by doing so.
If you’d like to listen to any other audio that I’ve done, you can just go to the categories list and select “audio.” Alternatively, you can go to my YouTube station, here.
Enjoy!
Robert Elessar 