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Salutations on a Friday

I don’t have much to say, today‒or much to write, I guess, if you want to be precise.  Honestly, I don’t think I have much to say in the literal sense, either, but it’s harder to tell since I don’t tend to talk to anyone at all before nine or so in the morning.  Often, I would prefer not to say anything even then, but people will insist on saying things to me, like “Good morning,” and so on.

I guess I don’t really mind the “Hi” and “Good morning” type greetings*, though it is often irritating that one is expected to return them in some ritual fashion, for no particular purpose that I can discern‒other than, I suppose, that of primate hierarchical, dominance, and coalitional signaling between members of the same flange of naked house apes.  I doubt most people think much about it.  Still, a “Hi” is okay.  I can return it with a word and a nod, though often my voice is apparently too quiet for other people to hear when I reply.  I also will often give a Vulcan salute, which is good because it is silent and distinctive.

I gave one of those to a young man on the train who had asked me which stop was next because he needed to get off at a particular one.  I gave him useful information, he got off at his desired stop, and as he left, he thanked me.  I said a somewhat befuddled “you’re welcome” and without thinking did a low-key Vulcan salute.  I’m not sure he noticed it.

It can be amusing to greet or say goodbye to people using the American Sign language “love” gesture, with the index and pinky fingers and thumbs out but the middle two fingers down, as if you were Spider-Man shooting webs straight up into the air.  It’s not that I particularly like telling people that I “love” them‒generally, I don’t (love them or want to tell them), and I think the whole “I love you, man” kind of thing is very much overused, and bastardizes and cheapens the word and the very concept of love.

On the other hand, if you fold your thumb in, the “love” sign turns into the heavy metal sign of the devil (supposedly), so for people toward whom you have the least affection, it can be a good way to slag them off without them even realizing you’re doing it.  I know, it’s petty and rather unsatisfying, but it’s not as though you can act on your real impulses.  If you set them on fire with a homemade flame-thrower or beat them to death with a baseball bat, you’re liable to get arrested, even‒and this is the galling point‒if everyone else in the office agrees that the person is annoying.

This is all hypothetical, of course.

Anyway, I will be working tomorrow, so I suspect that I’ll be writing another blog post in the morning.  Yippee.  I don’t know why, but I have not yet been able to break that habit.

I am tempted just to sleep in the office tonight rather than go back to the house.  It’s a bit pointless, all the going back and forth.  There’s no one and nothing waiting at the house for me.  Even the neighborhood cats are coming around less often; someone else must be putting out better food than I do.

This is probably just as well.  I only started feeding the cats because my housemate used to do it, and he said he was going to come pick up the really skittish one.  He has not yet done so, and it’s been a few years now‒I don’t recall how long‒and I’ve been spending money on cat food that I could…I don’t know, that I could use as washrags to wipe the bathroom sink, something like that?  Nothing that I spend money on is really beneficial, other than books, perhaps, but I have oodles of those, and I still haven’t read much of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply as Possible, or Spacetime and Geometry, or Classical Electrodynamics or any of those books that I keep meaning to read.

It’s all very boring, but at least I have chronic pain and depression and insomnia to keep things from being too peaceful.  It’s too bad I don’t have drug or alcohol problems‒at least those keep life from being predictable.

I was being tongue-in-cheek with that last sentence.  I don’t want to have drug or alcohol problems, though they are enticing routes to self-destruction.  It was bad enough when I had to take prescription pain meds for so long.  And my favorite alcoholic beverages are the ones I imagine drinking; the real ones are always a disappointment, and they leave me feeling unpleasant.

I mean I feel unpleasant internally in that situation, meaning that I feel uncomfortable physically, that I feel unwell.  I know that I’m always relatively unpleasant to other people.

However, although my mind is not my friend, there are and have always been aspects of it that are the most treasured things about reality for me, and I don’t want to endanger those.  My love of learning and understanding, of reading, of horror and science fiction and fantasy, of music, all those things are treasures, even when my depression makes them inaccessible to me.  I don’t want them to go away permanently, at least not while I’m alive.  I guess that means that, if I were to get cancer, I wouldn’t want a brain tumor.

Of course, that would mean that I would be most likely to get a brain tumor, if the universe dealt in irony, which as far as I can tell it does not.  As far as I can tell, all instances of seeming “karmic” irony are cases of selection bias or recall bias.  We remember the time the guy who refused to fly died in a train derailment, or when the exercise guru died young of a heart attack, not realizing that we remember them precisely because they are unusual and atypical.  They are cases of “man bites dog”, which is news, according to the cliché, while “dog bites man” is not.

Talk to you tomorrow.

*On the other hand, I have great trouble with “How are you doing?” and related greetings.  I almost always freeze up for at least a moment when met with such inquiries.  I don’t know what to say.  Most days I feel that I am not doing well at all, but I don’t necessarily want to say that to others, nor are they likely to want to hear it, and I feel irritated at being put on the spot, especially when people don’t seem really to care much how well or poorly I’m faring.

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Monday’s blogger at least still likes to learn

Hurray, hurray.  It’s Monday.

It’s probably hard to tell from the printed words, there, but I was being sardonic with that opening pseudo-exclamation.  I’m not excited that it’s Monday and the beginning of a new work week.  Then again, I’m not excited by much of anything.  Staying at the house doesn’t seem likely to be exciting, either.  There’s not much I can think of doing or any place I can think of going that seems exciting.  Nearly all the things in the world are on some spectrum from boring to stressful.

I don’t recommend this as a way of being, not even to myself.  I’m trying to find ways around it, or rather, to counteract it, but all my previous attempts have not succeeded in any durable fashion, as should probably be obvious.  Various medications, various therapies, lifestyle changes, exercise‒none of it has worked.  Some time ago, I had some hopes that trying marijuana that a former friend had would at least help my pain, if not my depression, but it did neither after two tries, and when I tried too much when I was in particularly bad pain, it made me quite sick to my stomach.  I was throwing up for a few hours (not continuously, of course, but it was still pretty bad).

It’s ironic that THC is used to treat nausea in many cases.  Evidently, my nervous system is too atypical for such things.

I recently happened upon some videos about psilocybin, specifically that there’s a study beginning on using it to try to treat some of the negative symptoms of autism spectrum disorder.  I know it has been used to treat recalcitrant depression and related disorders, including depression in people facing terminal cancer.  Psychedelics have always sounded intriguing, and people make much of them, but I think, given my experiences with other meds, I would be very frightened to try any of them.  My mind is not my friend, and I worry that I would be particularly prone to a “bad trip”, and there’s no way to abort such a thing once it has started; one just has to go through it to the other end.

Speaking of being anxious and frightened of things that many people find beneficial, I had meant to retry riding my new bike yesterday, and perhaps to ride it to the train and then into the office today, but I find myself subtly terrified to do so.  The beginning of last week was just so exceptionally painful and horrible that I am frightened of reinitiating it.  I wish I could know that it’s something that would resolve after a time, but it seemed to worsen over the course of the three or four days I was riding, until by last Monday I was bed-ridden, and I was even grumpier and more cheerless than usual on Tuesday, if you can imagine such a thing.

I think I’ll have to forgo it.  My boss really liked the bike, and offered to buy it from me if I can’t use it, but then I need to get it up to the office, which would mean riding it.  I don’t see myself carrying it.

My train is coming in five minutes.  I’ll pause and then return to this once I get on the train.

***

Okay, I’m on the train now.  What was I talking about?  Oh, yeah, the bike.  I guess I could have it shipped up to the office.  I think Uber even provides services like that, or I could try to see if there’s a way to set up an Uber in a vehicle that can carry the bike.  It’s a thought.  I don’t see my boss making a trip all the way down to my place to pick it up.

I guess I should stick to walking, even though it’s slower.  At least I can listen to audiobooks and podcasts and such while walking.  Nothing beats The Fellowship of the Ring as walking accompaniment, since it’s all about a journey on foot.  Even walking has its troubles, of course‒I have spandex braces on my left knee and right ankle to address the little bit of walking I did yesterday, and the right side of my back is in moderate spasm.  But that sort of stuff is par for the course.  If/as I lose weight, some of that will decrease, and some of it may even disappear.

Life is annoying on so many levels.  But at least there are lots of videos on things like hyperbolic geometry and computers and tensors and matrices and Einstein’s field equations and things like that.  It’s often the case that if I find several different people explaining the same thing I end up with a much deeper understanding.  Each teacher or author or whatever approaches things in a slightly different way, with different emphasis.  When one sees a subject from multiple angles, one tends to get a more complete and thorough understanding of it.  In this, I guess it’s analogous to binocular vision, which gives us depth perception.

I really want to read Zee’s book on quantum field theory, but although these new glasses are better for such smallish print, I think maybe I should have gone even higher on the strength.  Maybe I’ll go to the drugstore over lunch and pick up a stronger pair.  It would get me a bit more exercise, at least.

Please don’t emulate or internalize my negative outlook on things; I have no desire to see a world where more people are depressed.  Do try to keep learning.  Try to build as accurate a map of the world‒in all senses‒as you can.  Be ruthless with yourself in that process.  Your biases will try to trick you, and they will never stop trying, so you need to apply active countermeasures against them.  It’s a pain, but it’s important (and often satisfying and even thrilling) to work toward as accurate a map as you can get, not one that shows a world the way you would like it to be or you believe it to be.  A poor map will be less likely to get you anywhere you might want to go.

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My gruntlement is low today

It’s Tuesday morning.  I wasn’t actually planning to write anything when I got up today, but then I remembered that, more or less on a whim, I had brought my little laptop computer with me, so I figured I might as well write something.

For one thing, I’ll embed the “video” of my last audio blog—the one about Morgoth and whatnot—below, so if anyone prefers to do their listening via YouTube, they can do so.  Evidently, the Google podcast app is going to be phased out, and one is going to have to listen to podcasts via YouTube Music at some point in the future (or use some other service/app).  That’s a bit frustrating, because there’s at least one podcast that I get via subscription that one cannot get in its entirety on YouTube, but can get through the app.  I guess they’ll figure out a way to deliver that, but it’s irritating to have to change my settings once again.

I guess it shouldn’t matter.  I should just cancel all my subscriptions and services and platforms and even cable and internet.  They’re not really doing me any good, and they cost money, and honestly, I really would expect not to be alive starting sometime soon.  I’ve been expecting that for a long time, now, though, and I haven’t really been able to work up the gumption to bring it about.

I have at least been creeping my way in that direction.  I have flammable liquids for potential immolation—useful for other, more traditional things as well, of course.  I have scalpels and utility knives, useful for cutting various things, including oneself, but of course, they’re also generally useful for many things.  And recently I bought a nice length of rope—too long, really—and learned how to tie a hangman’s knot.  That last bit is rather surprisingly easy, and it’s a pleasant and useful knot, it turns out, especially to someone who used to be in the Boy Scouts a lifetime ago.  Ironically, it has many similarities to an informal necktie knot.

But, I’m still alive for the moment, though I’m very uncomfortable and unhappy in general, and I still haven’t gotten health insurance.  I get a near-panic feeling when I even think seriously about getting insurance.  I’m not entirely sure why that is.

Yesterday morning I felt really horrible, and I think it’s because I was trying to reintroduce some things I like into my diet to see if I can tolerate them.  I guess I can’t, at least not in the state I’m in (Florida).  It seems I can’t even enjoy the things I like to eat, but then again, I can’t expect nature to be there for my convenience.

I could try to work against nature’s convenience, in return, I guess.  At the very least, I could do my best to add to global warming and disrupt the biosphere and cause toxins and pollutants to accumulate, as a silly sort of revenge.  It might be fun.

I did feel less bad as the afternoon wore on and I avoided any indulgences, to the point where, near the end of the day, in idle moments, I got out Spacetime and Geometry, Gravitation, Euclidean Quantum Gravity, and even the old Thomas and Finney calculus text—the latter because sometimes I feel like I want to re-hone and improve my skills with mathematics, and Brilliant, for all that it’s a wonderful site, just doesn’t seem to work for me for some things.

I did find the two physics texts (which I opened in the middle, since I was looking for rather specific information relating to Λ, the cosmological constant) much more accessible and relatively easy to follow compared to what I was expecting.  Gravitation, in particular, is an intimidatingly large tome, but is nevertheless a bit of a “my first reader” in overall impression when compared to Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine.  I didn’t get very far in any of them in the time I had yesterday, but it was nice to realize that—though some mathematical formalisms are beyond my current expertise (thus the Thomas and Finney)—all of it made sense to me.  Credit the writers as much as my own cleverness, but I do give myself some credit.

Maybe I should get a biology textbook, just to reinvigorate my interest in that general subject as well.  I’m more of a literal expert in that subject than I am in GR or quantum mechanics or mathematics, though, so maybe a basic college text would be too repetitive?  I don’t know.

I’m having a bit of trouble with my laptop today; Word has frozen up on me twice this morning, which is a bit frustrating.  I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.  I’m not sure how long I’ve had this laptop, but it’s been a few years, at least.  Ordinarily, I would think of getting a new one to replace it, but that seems like entirely too much work, and is rather pointless.  I don’t expect to write any more fiction.

The thing that led me to bring the laptop computer back with me last night was the thought of maybe at least rereading what I have so far of Outlaw’s Mind and maybe even DFandD.  I talked to my sister on Sunday and gave her a bit of a (probably rather tedious) rundown of how those stories, especially the former, interconnect with the larger universe of my books, including particularly The Chasm and the Collision, and the potential novel Changeling in a Shadow World, and other stories, all going back to the first novel I ever “finished”, back in high school—Ends of the Maelstrom—which I could probably recreate* if I had the gumption.  I certainly still know all the main characters’ names and stories and arcs and all.  I even remember my opening line:  “Horraban was happy now.”  I also remember my rather ominous ending, though not the precise words.

Many of the universes of my stories are connected to each other.  In effect, I suppose, they’re all connected via what the wizard in DFandD refers to as the “omniverse”.  I had long thought of it as the metaverse, but then Mark Fuckerberg arrogated that term to his pathetic attempt at virtual reality, and so I had to find another term.  I guess “omniverse” is actually more accurate and descriptive, but I thought the other sounded cooler.  Now it doesn’t.

Anyway, I have scads of potential stories I could write, some interconnected and some stand-alone, but I doubt that I will ever write any of them.  I just don’t have the energy nor do I have the motivation.  Merely going to work and getting back to the house uses up all the mental energy I have, and then some; much of my mental energy I need is sucked from my future, shortening my potential span of mental life as I go.

I suppose if some wealthy benefactor were to show up and offer to pay my expenses in return for getting me to write full time, I might do so.  Perhaps that could happen, but I won’t hold my breath, and I don’t encourage you to do so either.

In the meantime, though, here is the “video” from my last audio blog.  If you watch it on YouTube, please give a thumbs up, and subscribe, and share, and all that, if you’re at all willing to do so.  Thanks.

*It was 574 pages (and roughly 250,000 words, I think), handwritten on thin-ruled notebook paper, with many additions that ran into the margins, though some of these were tattered because I habitually ate paper from the edges of notebook sheets back then.  Anyway, I lost that original book when I lost all my belongings thanks to the depredations of the counties and state of Florida.  For that, I hold at least something of a grudge.

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TTFN

I think I’m going to take a break from writing these blog posts, and I may quit doing them entirely.

They aren’t doing me any good‒they’re certainly not encouraging anyone to buy my books or to listen to my music.  They also aren’t functioning successfully as any sort of therapy, which was a large part of my hope.

Of course, it’s possible that my mental health would have been even worse if I hadn’t been doing this blog, but it couldn’t have been that much worse‒almost by definition‒and maybe I would have reached a catastrophic failure at some point sooner than it’s going to happen now, and at least I wouldn’t have had to suffer through the extra time I have in this branch of reality.

And finally, not least, this blog certainly isn’t working as any kind of cry for help for me, though I’ve tried to use it that way.  Perhaps there’s just too much of a “bystander effect” for this to function effectively in that mode.

I’m pretty sure these posts are not doing any good for anyone out there in the world.  There are people who are entertained by them sometimes, of course, and they tell me so, and I appreciate that.  But that’s not a strong enough motivation to keep going.  My apologies; I do not intend to denigrate you in any way, my readers.  It’s just that my strength is running out, and I feel horrible, physically and mentally.

I’ve been doing this blog at least partly as a habit, continuing the morning writing I did for years when working on my fiction.  I’m not writing fiction anymore.  It just feels too futile.

I don’t think my stories are bad.  I think some of them are pretty darn good.  But only a handful of people will ever read any of them, and though many people will say that one does art mainly for oneself‒and at some level, that is definitely true‒one also really wants to be appreciated.  Likewise for music.

I mean, yes, Van Gogh painted many paintings in his lifetime, though he only sold one…but then again, he did cut off his ear and end up killing himself, too (I knew he was a genius).

Anyway, although even Stephen King writes because he must‒so he says, and I don’t doubt him‒I don’t think he would have written nearly as many books if no one were buying them.  It just gets discouraging after a while.

I may do some little audio snippets here and there and share them on this blog.  Sometimes those can be rewarding, and they’re usually brief, and as long as I keep the editing to a minimum, they’re not too much effort.  I have a few little rants I’d like to go on sometime soon.  So those will probably appear here, if I end up doing them.  But otherwise, I don’t see the point in much else.

I honestly don’t want to go to work anymore.  Of course, today is payroll day, so I’m going, because people would be left in the lurch if I didn’t.  But it’s not rewarding, except in the obvious and banal way.  I mean, there are people at the office with whom I get along, but as has been the case most of my adult life, people mainly spend time with me because I’m useful.

I am useful, in many ways.  And it is nice to be useful.  But it has its limits.  Even at work, I try to get across to people how much distress I’m in, without being too melodramatic, but nobody seems really to take me seriously.

I guess that’s one of the drawbacks of having a dark and odd sense of humor and also having difficulty expressing one’s emotions.  Even if you talk about trying to stretch the pain out of your back by using a noose‒as I did yesterday, which was a particularly painful day‒people don’t seem to realize that really, suicide seems more and more attractive all the time.

I can’t easily participate in the comments anymore on a website I’ve followed for a long time, and I don’t think the host likes me, anyway, though I admire and like him and have enjoyed following his website, and recommend it readily.  To be fair, I am weird, and I am dark, and I tend to bring people down.  Does the fact that I get on some people’s nerves surprise anyone?

So, yeah, I don’t think I’m going to be writing any more blog posts for a while, and I may not write any ever again.  And, again, I may put audio stuff up here‒and I may turn some or all of them into “videos” as well, and put those on YouTube‒but I don’t have a planned schedule for those things right now, so we’ll have to see what happens.

Anyway, I’m feeling queasy/nauseated (and probably nauseous, but that’s for you all to judge) right now, and my train will be here soon.  Try to have a good day, and a good year, and a good rest of your lives.  Somebody ought to do it, and it’s not likely to be me.

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Peculiar thoughts prior to the 1st of 2 holiday weekends

It’s Friday morning, and I did not walk to the train today.  Neither did I walk back from the train yesterday evening.  I didn’t really think I was going to do the “yesterday evening” thing, and I didn’t really intend to do the “this morning” thing, because I didn’t want to push it after having taken a long time off since doing any longish walking.

I don’t feel fatigued or sore or anything, but there is some chafing here and there that tends to happen when I restart walking seriously, but which I somehow forget every time until it happens again.  There’s some flaw there in the code I’m running in my brain, it seems.  Then again, there are many flaws in my brain code, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.

I’m scheduled to work tomorrow, so I will be writing a blog post unless they cancel the work day because no one is going to show up.  As far as I know, though, I will be working, so keep a weather eye on the horizon.  If the workday is canceled, then I guess the next blog post I will write will be on Tuesday morning, since I think even our office is going to be closed on Monday.

I’m writing on my laptop computer today, since I have the time before the train comes, and I’m not sweaty and there are plenty of seats.  I’ve been trying to be upbeat and whimsical and so on in my recent blog posts, but I don’t think I’m going to do that today.  For one thing, those posts don’t seem to garner as much attention and readership as my despondent and despairing and hateful blog posts.

I’m not sure why that is.  Perhaps the things which I find interesting and entertaining and “positive” to discuss are not what most readers find engaging.  If one is to base one’s assessment on the “reels” that are shown on Facebook, which I’ve been sort of auditing lately out of (rapidly dwindling) curiosity, then people’s interests are very silly and rather pathetic, though they can often be quite funny.  Of course, it’s probably rather silly and very pathetic that I’m even indulging my morbid curiosity by looking at them.

I haven’t been reading any books at all for some time.  Just ask Kindle; it apparently keeps track of my “streaks” and “records” and whatnot.  That is ever-so-slightly disconcerting, but I know there are essentially no humans involved in keeping track of me personally—at least not with respect to my reading.  It’s all mindless, algorithmic stuff, and the algorithms aren’t all that good, it seems, because Amazon is pretty bad at recommending books in which I’m interested*.

Sean Carroll and Sam Harris are much better at finding people with ideas I want to explore; a good many of the books I’ve read in recent years have been by people I’ve first encountered in one of both of their podcasts.  I guess that’s not too surprising.  I’m interested in their thoughts, so I’m likely to be interested in people they find interesting.

I still haven’t set up my health insurance.  I have a real mental block about this, or an emotional block, or whatever.  I don’t know how much it’s going to cost, for one thing, but the real barrier is, I think, my self-hatred.  I worry that, if I get health insurance, I’m going to feel obligated in some strange way to take care of myself and try to maintain and then improve my overall health and lifespan.  But that’s only going to prolong my existence, which I don’t consider a win.

I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I have almost a fantasy of being diagnosed with some sort of inevitably terminal illness that will give me a short bit of time at least to try to connect with and say goodbye to people I love, and which will then kill me with relatively little mess.  It’s the sort of thing I think many people would want at the end of their lives (though they probably would want to put it off as long as possible) if the symptoms weren’t too unpleasant and could be palliated at reasonably low cost, so one wasn’t absolutely miserable in the time approaching one’s death.

Unfortunately, we usually do not get to choose, and we often get no warnings.

Well, actually, in a sense, we all get very long-term warnings.  Any sensible person is on constructive notice from an early age that someday death will come for them.  I suppose most people try to avoid thinking about it, but that doesn’t make it go away.

It’s interesting occasionally to think of the various other animals in the world and wonder how many of them ever recognize, at anything other than a rudimentary, acute, fight-or-flight response level, that they are going to die.  I think very few of them do.  Perhaps the cetaceans do, since many of them are both very intelligent and social, and they appear to communicate to some significant degree.  I’m not sure how much even the other great apes (apart from humans) actually recognize their own individual mortality.  I sometimes suspect that elephants know, but I’m not sure what gives me that impression.

If there are birds that are aware of mortality, I suppose it would probably be the corvids.  I guess it would be appropriate if ravens knew about death.

Huh.  That may end up being the substance of my pre-holiday message, ironically enough, though there really isn’t any substance or any point to what I’ve written today.  Of course, that’s probably entirely appropriate, since there is no apparent teleological substance to life itself.  It just happens, and then it stops.  This may be true even of the universe as a whole.

That’s okay.  Something doesn’t have to have some external purpose to be worth happening.  Just as one can enjoy reading a book or watching a movie or show, or listening to a song, that has no deep message or purpose or meaning other than itself, one can—potentially—enjoy a life without any meaning other than its own existence.

If only I could put that set of ideas into practice.  Alas, we here return to the faulty code I’m running.  If only I could update that more readily.  Goodness knows I’d do something more useful than Google and Microsoft and all the others do with most of their updates.  I may despise myself, but I do think comparatively highly of at least some of my capacities.

You would think that would give me at least some sense of satisfaction, but unfortunately it makes me feel worse about my character and nature.  And that seeming contradiction bring me back to lamenting my buggy code, and thus I appear to be stuck in a meta-level loop, or a perhaps in an old, Basic-style “Return without Gosub” error.

Oh, well.  Have a good day please, and if I don’t write anything else before then, I hope those of you who celebrate it have a Merry Christmas.

*YouTube has a better track record with video recommendations, but that’s deteriorating gradually, or I am, or both.

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The young and tender wit is turn’d to folly, blasting in the blog…

Hello, good morning, happy Thursday, and—as always—welcome to another edition of my blog.

There’s not much to add today, I’m afraid.  I launched the “final” version of my song “Breaking Me Down” on my Iterations of Zero blog and on my YouTube channel, for what it’s worth.  To the surprise of no one, it doesn’t seem to have been listened to by many people, so far.  I suppose that’s what happens when one puts a song out and no one’s ever heard of the person who made it.  I certainly have no marketing apparatus at my back to try to promote the song, and I would probably rather use such an apparatus to promote my books if I had such a thing.  The song is honestly just for my own self-indulgence, though of course I’d be delighted if anyone listened to it and liked it.

I’ve written only another page or so on Neko/Neneko since last week, and I’ve done a smattering of editing on Unanimity.  Some of this relative dearth of output is due to the fact of my song.  Most of my “free” hours in recent weeks were burned in arranging and playing and singing and producing “Breaking Me Down,” so my usual work—not my day job, obviously—got left by the wayside.  If there exists a person who is actually looking forward to any of my written works in progress—and I doubt that such a person exists—then I apologize.  I can only say that I would be much more motivated to continue working and to go faster if I but heard from you once in a while.  I have accounts on Facebook and Twitter, as well as my two blogs here on WordPress…and, of course, you’re free to leave reviews of my books on Amazon.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Well…I would certainly like to hear from you.

Anyway, that’s more or less all I have to say for this week.  I hope you’re all well, and that you continue to be well, in this most possible of all possible worlds.

TTFN

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Art thou not sorry for these heinous blog posts?

Hello everyone.  I’m sorry to report that I’m not doing a “My heroes have always been villains” episode today (as must be obvious by now).  I simply don’t feel well, and it doesn’t make sense to try to write such posts when one can’t summon enthusiasm.  An engaging discussion of a good villain (Is that a contradiction in terms?  I don’t think so.) deserves someone writing with a bit of joy about the subject, considering that the whole point is to have fun with it.  I’m not really in a fun state of mind right now.  So, I’ll just give a quick report of what’s going on, boring though that may be.  Apologies.

I’m making steady, even rapid, progress on Unanimity.  It’s still probably more than a month away from being a completed first draft, but it’s moving along.  I’m amazed by how long it’s become, and I’m going to have to be especially brutal in the rewrite and editing process (I think I’ve said this before—I tend to be repetitive, as I suspect you’ve noticed).  But, as I’ve also said before, stories must be what they want to be, so there’s only so much that I can do about it.  I don’t think it’ll be wasted time (any more than all time is) so try to be patient with me.

I finished the first draft of the audio of Chapter 8 of The Chasm and the Collision yesterday, and the sound editing process shall now begin.  I imagine it’ll be finished and released on a similar schedule to how the others have been coming out, which is roughly once every two weeks or so.  I’ll try to let you know if there are going to be delays.

I posted some thoughts on Iterations of Zero earlier this week, in a blog post titled “Never hate your interlocutors.”  I think it’s a particularly timely message, so I encourage you to read it and think about it.  We could all use a little more patience and little less vilification in our discourse than we tend to have, nowadays and always.

And, finally, I’ve decided to embed here the “video” for Chapter 7 of The Chasm and the Collision, so that those of you who come here to the blog can easily enough listen to the chapter on YouTube, in case that’s the simplest way for you to enjoy it.  If you are enjoying the chapters, I do hope you’ll consider buying the book.  I think it’s a good story…but then again, I would.  I am unavoidably biased.  That doesn’t necessarily make me wrong, but it makes it difficult for me to be an honest judge, and I haven’t received any real feedback from anyone with which to update my Bayesian credences.  We’ll see what happens, I suppose.  Or maybe we won’t, who knows?

Here’s the video:

 

That’s about all there is this week, or all that comes to mind that’s worth sharing.*  To paraphrase the typical Metta mantra:

May you dwell in safety.
May you be happy and healthy.
May you be free of afflictions.
May you be at peace.

TTFN

*Assuming, of course, that it is worth sharing.

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Thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blog.

Well, it’s that day of the week again (Thursday), when I write yet another blog post for the entertainment, and occasionally the edification, of those who want to read it.  As I did two weeks ago, I’m breaking up my author’s notes, interspersing them with less specific ramblings on my current, past, and planned writings.  Next week, I’ll continue my author’s note series, with a note on Son of Man.  Once I’ve caught up with the notes up to and including my latest published story, I plan to start periodically posting sample first chapters of my published works, as teasers to get readers interested—or, alternatively, to let them know for certain that they are uninterested—in the books and stories from which they’ll be excerpted.  This should be fun, I think, and will certainly be less work for me on those weeks when I post them.

Right now—so to speak—I’m near the completion of preparing to publish Hole for a Heart.  We at Chronic Publications are still struggling over the final form of the cover design for the story, though the basic design is already confirmed.  As those of you who have read it when it was available here know, it’s a dark story (how atypical for me, right?), but I like it a lot.  Thankfully, that’s more or less universal about my stories, and I can’t stress enough how thankful I am for the fact.  Of course, there are flaws in all of my works, and my earlier ones are less polished than those that follow, but I still enjoy thinking about them, and occasionally rereading them.  This almost always leads me to find errors that were missed in the editing process, as well as stylistic issues that I would now have changed…hopefully to improve upon them.  In the long run, I may create second editions of some books, especially the earlier ones, but that process requires time, of which commodity I am in short supply.  As is often the case (and as I think I’ve mentioned before) I frequently find myself quoting Andrew Marvell to myself: “If we had world enough, and time…”

Alas!

As is the usual case lately, I’ve been having difficulty finding new fiction that grips me enough to read, and I find this terribly depressing (it’s not the fault of the books).  Likewise, because I lost essentially everything I owned seven years ago tomorrow, I don’t have physical copies of all the hundreds of books that I’ve read and reread over the course of my life hitherto—for entertainment, inspiration, and edification.  Over time, I’m gradually trying to re-accumulate at least some of them, mainly in Kindle format, because that way I can carry my library with me wherever I go.  But even with e-book versions, to reproduce my previous library would cost a great deal of money, so it’s a piecemeal process at best.  I’m also always looking for new recommendations, and the other day on his Facebook page, Stephen King gave one for a book called The Chalk Man, by C. J. Tudor.  I looked up the book on Amazon—it’s available on Kindle—and it does look good.  I also like the author’s name, not that such a thing is of great importance.  Still, I can’t help playing word games, and inevitably thought of the fact that if you combined the surnames of the recommendee and the recommender, you’d get the phrase “Tudor King.”

Such are the processes that take place in my mind.

In any case, that book will likely be the next fiction book I purchase, and I’ll try to remember to let you all know how it is, once I’ve read it.

I do find myself able to read nonfiction, and I also use Audible, listening to a great deal of nonfiction on my commute to and from work.  Lately, I’ve been in Steven Pinker mode, a fact at least partially triggered by the recent release of his newest book, Enlightenment Now.  I’m currently visually reading one of his earlier works, The Stuff of Thought, about language and the human mind, and listening to his second most recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.  Once that’s done, Enlightenment Now already awaits on my Audible app, and I look forward to it eagerly.

I couldn’t easily exaggerate Pinker’s value as a thinker and writer.  His books are not short, and neither are they diffuse.  He packs a great deal of information and ideas into them, but his writing style and style of thought are exceptional and engaging.  If you want a taste of the enthusiasm and fun he brings to his work, and engenders in those who come to it, watch the following video of his presentation on The Stuff of Thought at Google.  His discussion on the nature of swearing—with numerous examples explained and explored—is both hilarious and thought provoking.

 

As I think I’ve said before, reading about ideas and concepts, even rather difficult ones, isn’t merely a way for me to pass my time between reading and writing fiction.  Even if it didn’t have any other value (it does), such exploration strengthens the mind’s muscles and makes it more fit and able to perform every task to which one puts it, including the writing of fiction.  Also, I think it improves one’s skill at narrative.  When an author can take a dense and complex subject and write about it in prose that’s both gripping and clear, that style of writing is surely one from which a writer of fiction can learn many lessons.  Some stories are good enough that they can be carried along simply by the power of the plot, even if the prose is awkward, but when one can add to such stories a structure made of language both beautiful and elegant, well…that’s a spicy meatball!

I’m about a hundred years too young to consider comparing myself to someone like Pinker, or to other great writers of fiction and nonfiction alike, but that just means that I can learn a great deal from them in the meantime.  In fact, a writer/reader’s marginal rate of return is probably greatest long before he or she begins to be in the same league as the one who wrote what he or she is reading.  So, I can heartily recommend that writers read books by those who are far better writers than themselves, and as often as possible.

But, also, do read some of my books in between.  I’ll do my best to keep raising my standards.

TTFN