books

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The blogs of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.

Hello and good day, everyone.  It’s Thursday morning, the last Thursday of May (2020 (AD or CE (Gregorian calendar))), and—at least where I live—people are starting to go back to work.  We can only wait and see whether this will be something that large numbers of the population will regret or not, but I can certainly sympathize with their desire.

I haven’t yet written anything for Iterations of Zero this week.  I could post one of a few bits that I’ve already written; I have two pieces primed and ready.  However, those essays are rather dark and somewhat negative; they have a sardonic and grim character, and that’s not what I want to get across right now.  I’m trying very hard to be positive (this despite appallingly wet weather, even by south Florida standards, which is making my chronic back pain flare up something fierce*).

So, instead of using either one of those articles, which I’ll save for later, I think I’ll make a post embedding my five original song “videos”** which are up on YouTube.  I’ve said before, half-jokingly, that I have roughly half-an-album’s-worth of original songs recorded and produced, and I’m inclined to work toward another half, just for shits and giggles.  But it would be nice to have more people tell me what they think about the songs before I put a lot of effort in.  I have received good reviews from those who have listened so far (and they weren’t all family members).  Considering the limitations under which they were made, I think the songs have come out remarkably well.  Still, I’m definitely my own primary audience thus far.

This isn’t so terrible; it’s nice that, just as I enjoy reading my own stories, I also enjoy listening to my own songs.  But I do face a serious obstacle in that I’m built or was trained or raised in such a way as to find self-promotion extremely difficult, and even distasteful.  Some large and loud part of me finds it unseemly to tell people, “Hey, listen to this song that I made,” or even, “Hey, you should read this book that I wrote.”  I’m also terribly embarrassed to be in the same room as someone listening to one of my songs.

I think I would benefit greatly from awakening just a little bit of the Trumpian spirit that must surely lie dormant within me.  When I’m honest with myself, and can push past my cringing, I really do think the songs are pretty good, especially considering what I have to work with***.  And in all honesty, I think my stories and books are quite good, and if it wouldn’t be just supremely cheesy, I’d go on Amazon and rate them each five stars and give them dazzling reviews.  That’s probably what Kanye West or The Donald would do, but I don’t know if I’m capable of it.

Speaking of my books, I’m about seventy pages from finishing the second to last run-through of Unanimity.  This means that the final turn, with layout, cover design, etc., is fast approaching.  I’m tempted to say that I feel like Frodo finally reaching the Plateau of Gorgoroth, but Unanimity is definitely NOT like the One Ring.  That is to say, I don’t consider it a cursed or dark or deadly burden of which I’m eager to be rid.  Quite the contrary, I love it dearly****.  But it has been a helluva journey through spacetime and through mindspace and workspace and whatever other phase space one might conjure to describe the process.  It’s certainly taken longer in proper time than the journey portion of The Lord of the Rings took‡, though the main-arc events of that book, from “A Long-expected Party” even just until “The Scouring of the Shire” last at least a good seventeen or so years, if memory serves.  Correct me if I’m wrong†, please.

With that good and exciting news, I think I’ll wrap things up for the week.  As always, I wish you all the best of all possible things, both short-term and long-term, both deep and shallow.  And though it is true that, if wishes were horses, we’d all be hip deep in horseshit, that wish is nevertheless entirely sincere.

TTFN

*Do you hear that high, plaintive, irritating sound, Mr. Anderson?  That is the sound of the world’s tiniest Stradivarius playing a doleful tune.

**This is in scare quotes because the video portion of these songs is just a fixed shot of the Iterations of Zero symbol.  It’s simply a fact that YouTube is one of the best, most available means by which one can spread an audio file and make it available, in principle, to the largest possible audience, but to use it, you need some kind of “video”.  There is no comparable “YouWoofer” or other stereo-speaker-titled venue for purely audio tracks for people to share, though podcasts are certainly all the rage.  Likewise, Facebook lets one upload videos as one wishes (true to its name, I must admit), but if there’s a way to upload purely audio files to the platform, I’ve yet to discover it.  Ditto for Twitter.

***Cue the “back-alley” doctor scene from Tim Burton’s Batman, in which the nascent Joker first sees his new face.

****And you will, too.  Believe me.  Everyone agrees with me.  No one’s ever done a book like this before.  It’s huge (it really is).

‡Or brandybuck or even gamgee.  Ha ha.

†I know, I know—I?  Wrong?  I!?  Don’t be absurd!

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Thou know’st we blog by wit, and not by witchcraft; And wit depends on dilatory time.

CREATOR: gd-jpeg v1.0 (using IJG JPEG v62), quality = 75

Okay, so…

It’s another Thursday, and I again don’t have any goal or point in mind as I begin writing this weekly blog post.  There’s not much new to communicate, except to say that certain previously mentioned things are now more imminent…as, I suppose, should always be the case if any progress is being made at all.

Specifically, I’ve almost finished my design for the cover picture for Free Range Meat,* and plan to have that story out and available for purchase on Amazon (Kindle format only) before August arrives.  It will be available on Kindle Unlimited, like all my short stories, so those of you who subscribe to that will be able to read it for free.  This may or may not be the case with Unanimity when it becomes ready for publication.  The paperback version of that book is going to be sizable, and it’s probably going to be in “trade paperback” format, since in smaller form it would be quite a fat book and/or have quite small print.  I’m not sure how I’ll settle that issue.  Of course, Unanimity will also be available for Kindle.

On other fronts, I’ve been semi-obsessively laboring over the mixing and production of my latest song, Catechism, as I think I mentioned last week.  I’ve learned some new things about the process since I made Schrodinger’s Head and Breaking Me Down, and part of me aches to go back and completely redo them, but that impulse isn’t strong enough—for now—to engender action.  It’s just such a time-consuming process, and when I’m doing it, other things get pushed relatively to the side, including actual, regular practicing of the guitar and even my editing and writing time.

As I’ve said before, this would all be easier and happen faster if I were able to write full time, but since rent must be paid and food must be eaten if I’m to continue writing at all (at least, for more than a month or so), I’m afraid I have to pay those opportunity costs.  Oh, well.  I’m hardly alone in this.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make before I interrupted myself is that, because I’m learning as I go, Catechism is almost certainly going to be better produced and mixed than were my earlier efforts.  Whether or not it’s a good song is a judgement from which I have to recuse myself, being biased as I am.**  It’s peppy, certainly, and nothing like as dark as Breaking Me Down…though not as light-hearted as Schrodinger’s Head either, I have to admit.  I think my composition skills are improving along with my mixing and production skills, and hopefully that means the music is better.  In any case, I kind of like it; I guess that’s got to be worth something.

One of the slightly annoying facts about getting close to putting something out that’s not my main art form is that, as I finish, I get these gnawing and nagging ideas of more songs to do, and I have to resist jumping immediately into such pursuits.  Though editing and all related business is going fairly well, there’s no doubt that it’s been at least mildly slowed by my other activities.  And I have so many more stories to write once this one is done and published.  I have a novella to finish, tentatively titled Escape Valve, and ideas for many other short stories that would be fun.  I also have Neko/Neneko to write, and Dark Fairy and the Desperado, and Changeling in a Shadow World, and more beyond that.  I want to write the sequels to Mark Red, probably after doing a second edition of that novel.  Also, I plan to publish a hard copy collection of my short stories, tentatively titled Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, which I may have mentioned before.

I really need to win the lottery (which is vanishingly unlikely, especially since I don’t play it), or to find some rich benefactor somewhere.  If anyone knows such a person, I’d be deeply grateful if you’d send them my way.

And with that thought, I’ll call the blog post good for today, and get back to those other things that won’t let me go.  I hope you’re all enjoying the summer, if you’re in the northern hemisphere (and that you’re having a decent winter if you’re in the southern).  As is always implicit, I’d welcome your comments and feedback about anything you feel like commenting on, as long as it’s in good taste…or in bad taste that I happen to share.

TTFN

*A copy of the draft of the central image is at the head of this blog post.  Yes, it’s supposed to be blurry.

**This does not always take the form of bias in my favor, by the way; I think I’m not alone in being especially harsh in judging my own works, which makes it difficult to promote them enthusiastically.  I occasionally long for the unbridled narcissism of a Kanye West or a Donald Trump.  Well…not really.  But something at least a little closer to such a state would probably serve me better than my frequent and sometimes vicious self-condemnation, overlaid upon a baseline of irritating—and rather ironic—pomposity.  Que lástima.