Creative Writing

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“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

And here…we…go, as the Joker said.

I’m writing something now on Wednesday on the way to work, in the back seat of a Lyft.  This time, I’m writing it on my little laptop computer, which has the disadvantage that its keys are not illuminated, and the back seat is dark, so I have to type by memory, to do my own bespoke version of touch-typing.  This isn’t too great of a burden, since I’ve been typing for more than 40 years*, but it does take away some degree of the advantage in speed that typing on a real keyboard otherwise gives me over the phone.

If I ever get another small laptop like this one, I mean to make sure that the keyboard lights up.  It’s just too useful.

Anyway, upon opening this laptop for the first time in a few weeks, I found that it was still at the point in Outlaw’s Mind where I had stopped when rereading through and further editing it.  It’s right after Timothy’s encounter with the policeman.  He’s about to be brought to the Vipassana Center, where things will begin to become stranger for him.

I really am more pleased with the nature of the story as it is than with the more straightforward idea that had sparked it initially and had been prefigured by the original opening, which I am removing.  Really, I have removed it, but it’s still there in my postings here on my blog, of course.  If I were ever to finish it and publish, I suppose I would take it down from here on my site, as would also be the case with Extra Body.

I doubt that any of that will ever happen, though.  I don’t have the impetus to do either thing, nor to start HELIOS, nor any of the oodles of other stories waiting in the back of my mind, some of which are already well-developed and involve an overall universe, linking to others in my stories’ omniverse.

I guess it would be nice to continue with them.  It would be nice not to have to worry about so many little things day by day that drain my hit points and my spirit points.  If I were to win a large lottery payoff**, I guess I would use it to move back up north and just write full time.  I could even spend my spare time studying mathematics and physics and other sciences, if I had the energy.  Why not?

It’s darned unlikely that anything like that is going to happen, unfortunately.  I have no rich relatives or friends, and even if I did, it’s hard to see one of them wanting to support me while I’m writing.

I have so many story ideas in the back of my mind, written down in quick notes in my phone and other systems, or just swimming through my brain.  And I still think of new little ideas for self-contained stories (I hesitate to call them “short” given past experience) as I go along, but unlike before, I don’t jot them down anywhere.  That’s a huge surrender on my part, but I have to be realistic.

If the Everettian quantum multiverse exists, then it’s likely that in some proportion of the wave function I succeed at doing all these things.  Likewise, if the universe is infinite in spatial extent, there are certainly a fraction of the infinite copies of me out there who will have some inordinate luck and go on writing.  However, these possibilities are no consolation, as I have no experience of what they experience anymore than of some small, furry thing from Alpha Centauri.

I guess that’s also a good thing, though, since there are certainly versions of my life that are much, much worse than this one.  I wouldn’t want to experience them.  But, of course, experiencing is one of the functions of the individual, separate identities, not of the conglomerate of those that share some common characteristics or past.  No one should expect to be able to experience both worlds that split after some quantum “measurement”.  It’s not logical.

Once their cells have split, identical twins are separate beings, individuals each in his or her own right, and there is no mingling or superposition of their experiences.  Thank goodness.  Because we are all descendants of an unbroken line of cellular ancestors, and have common past with every living thing on the planet (and a few orbiting in space).  Imagine if we somehow were able to experience every other living thing at some level.  It would be a bit like that weird Gaia planet in the later Foundation novels.

Anyway, while I can dream of having some benefactor or patron who takes care of my living logistics while I write, and maybe even who helps me market and promote my books and related items, I can also, any time I like, dream about having superpowers, or being universally loved, or some other such nonsense.

Such dreams are nice (as the Radiohead song admits), but reality is not obligated to make any of our dreams come true, good or bad.  It doesn’t even make some aggregated average of people’s dreams come true.  It just does what it does, and it is what it is, and we are merely one little, evanescent—although relatively interesting—corner of a universe that may be infinite in space and in time, and perhaps in other ways beyond those.

*Man, are my fingers tired.

**Difficult, since I don’t play.

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There’s the respect that makes calamity of so long blogs

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for another weekly blog post.  Last Thursday I was out sick, so I only posted a very brief, almost telegraphic announcement of the fact that I wasn’t going to write a “true” post that day, and I said that I might write a true post on Friday if I was feeling better.  Of course, I was not feeling better by Friday, so there was no such post.

I’ve nearly recovered from my acute illness—probably some respiratory virus, but nothing too terribly severe—and now I am more or less back on my normal schedule.

Speaking of being “back”, though, my back has been acting up severely this week, and in an atypical fashion.  I’m not sure what triggered it.  Possibly it’s just due to being sick, with the coughing and the lying around more than usual and so on.  Possibly it’s something else.  Anyway, I’ve had to go to a combination of near-overdoses on my various OTC pain medications, and that’s not wonderful.  It got so severe yesterday that I was actually saying out loud that, if it didn’t improve, I was going to have to find some relatively high parking garage nearby and jump off it.  I was not exaggerating, as I think was obvious to those around me.

It’s easy enough to wonder why I don’t do that anyway, given that there is very little in my life that’s positive, and what positivity exists is episodic, and it can’t make up for the constant negatives of pain and illness and sleeplessness and depression and so on.  The closest I come to any comradely activity is streaming YouTube videos of people reacting to songs or movies that I like.  It’s almost, but not quite, exactly unlike watching a movie with a friend who has never seen it before.

Speaking of paraphrasing or otherwise referring to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I’m most of the way through the first run of editing Extra Body.  There’s a long way to go, since I usually do as many as seven such iterations before considering my editing done.  I figure by that time I’ll usually have lost any proprietary affection for a story and it will begin to bore me, so it’ll be easier to cut out extraneous material.

That’s the principle, at least.  I don’t know how well it’s worked hitherto; I’m too deep inside the process to trust my evaluation.  I did at least transcribe the material I had written so far, in passing, on HELIOS, so that if/when I’m ready, I’ll be able to pick up writing that by hand in its first draft.

Extra Body is my first non-horror story in a while (unless you count the beginning I made on writing The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, which is certainly not horror, but is also certainly nowhere near done, if it ever will be).  It’s hard for me to tell if it’s a good choice to have reverted to a sort of lighthearted science fiction story set in the modern world, but at least I was able to squeeze the first draft out.

Of course, I’m paring down the word count as I go.  As I’m sure is obvious to all of you, I get rather wordy when I write, especially when I’m using the computer keyboard, since I type quickly and usually can do so more readily even than I can speak out loud.

I’ve been reading some more books about quantum field theory (and related subjects) lately.  It’s still very intro level stuff, of course, but either because recurrent exposure to increasingly technical material is gradually sinking into my head, or because I’m just getting a tiny bit “smarter” overall over time, I’m actually finding some of it more familiar and understandable than before.

I must say that I was a little bit proud of myself not too long ago when I was thinking about how complex numbers are represented using a two-dimensional plane, with internally consistent mathematics and whatnot, and I wondered if one could have three-part complex numbers.  I soon realized that only even-numbered ones would work, and then I learned that these were indeed a thing (i.e., quaternions) and that indeed only even-numbered versions of such things can work.  Of course, it’s very difficult to visualize something that has four dimensions, so you just have to do the math, and I haven’t started to work on or learn that seriously, but I played with some “higher order” complex-number multiplications a few times, which was how I saw that only even-numbered ones, with separate “imaginary” roots would work.

On a vaguely related note:  I was listening to Sean Carroll’s podcast yesterday evening.  He was speaking to Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist who specializes in facial recognition and processing centers of the brain, and she mentioned that the attributes of a face can be thought of as many-dimensional, in the sense that there are numerous “variables” that can be represented about any given face, and that they effectively comprise a higher-dimensional space.

Then she turned the matter around and noted that there are apparently those who consider using such things as faces as ways of intuiting mathematical or related systems with higher dimensions, thus representing them in ways that the human mind is capable of visualizing.  I though that was a fascinating notion*.

It reminds me little bit of the concept of the “memory palace”, a mnemonic/rhetorical tool that originated in ancient Greece (so I understand) in which one associates the aspects of, say, a speech one is going to give with imagined artifacts or decorations in some imagined hall or room, so that the aspects of that speech can more readily be remembered and brought to mind when needed.

There are several fictional characters, most notably Hannibal Lecter and the BBC’s Sherlock, who use rather exaggerated versions of these memory palaces.  The one described in Hannibal is more coherent than the one in Sherlock, but they both take great liberties with how the concept was originally used.  Nevertheless, for the longest time, thanks to the amusing tableau** Thomas Harris described for how Hannibal Lecter had “stored” Clarice Starling’s (fictional) home address, I could readily reconstruct her address at will.  I think I may still be able to do it.  It should be something like “#33 Tindall Ave, Arlington, Virginia, 22308”.  If anyone wants to check my recollection, that would be welcome.  I’m not certain I got it right.

I’ve usually found such mnemonics more trouble than they’re worth.  It’s easier for me to connect concepts in the real world, building mental models of the way things work rather than trying to memorize.  This means I probably don’t learn as quickly as some do, but I learn deeply when I do, and it’s easier to connect one model to another and to spot analogies and similarities and possible connections between systems that might at first seem unrelated.  That was quite useful in medical practice, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Oh, I almost forgot:  Welcome to the first day of August in 2024!

That’s all I have to say about that.

Apparently the summer Olympics are currently taking place, but I’ve been unable to muster any interest in them, though I used to love them, and I find that the manufactured controversies about some apparent misconstrual of the opening ceremony or some such (and the juvenile ripostes by political antagonists of the original misconstruers responding to the supposed offense) all serves simply to reinforce my feeling that not just the human race, but indeed all life of any kind, is a bad idea.  Thank goodness for the apparent inescapability of the second law of thermodynamics.

Anyway, I feel I’ve been meandering about here, randomly bouncing from topic to topic, without any consistency or coherency, so I’ll bring this to a close soon.  I fear that this once-weekly blog posting suffers from the fact that there are topics I probably would have brought up as solitary daily blog posts when I was doing them, but that I now want to try to squeeze in here.

I just can’t write (or edit) new fiction and write daily blog posts too, not while I’m forced to keep my day job.  If anyone out there wants to pay for my living expenses and support me so I can both write new fiction and write daily blog posts while still studying physics and programming and the like in the meantime, please, let yourself be known!  I’d be pleased to hear from you.

Otherwise, I’m pretty sure none of this is going to last very much longer.  My pain and dysthymia and alienation and insomnia are increasingly unpleasant, and there are fewer and fewer things in my life that compensate.

Here’s to Macbeth’s proverbial last syllable of recorded time.  L’mavet!***

TTFN

*It does come up against difficulties when considering the notion of orthogonal axes of vector spaces being able to be rotated into one-another.  It’s hard to see how one could intuitively consider rotating the variables of, say, eye size and cheek color into one another, or what an inner (or “dot”) product or cross product of two such variables could mean…though with the latter, it makes the use of the “right hand rule” an amusing invocation of a slap in the face…or at least poking someone’s cheek.

**Involving Jesus (age 33) marching along with a .308 Enfield rifle at shoulder arms, followed by J. Edgar Hoover in a tutu, followed by Clarice driving a “Tin Lizzy” model T Ford, going past Arlington National Cemetery.  Something like that, anyway.

***This is an expression I invented this morning, the counter-toast to the famous L’chaim, which in Hebrew means “to life”.  Then, being me, I jotted down some words for the first verse of a parody song of “To Life” from Fiddler on the Roof:


“To death!  To death!  L’mavet!

L’mavet, L’mavet, to death!

Here’s to the father I tried to be

Here’s to that travesty

Drink L’mavet, to death,

To death, L’mavet.

L’mavet, L’mavet, to death.

Death has a way of releasing us

Luring and teasing us

Drink L’mavet, to deeeeeaaaath…”

That’s as far as I got, but I did only work on it for about five minutes, so, it’s not too bad.

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My charity is outrage, life my shame, and in that shame still blog my sorrows’ rage.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and it’s thus time for my now once again weekly blog post.  I hope you’re all pleased.

Before I go any further, does anyone out there know any way to reset the default font in Microsoft Word back to Calibri?  As I have mentioned before, I cannot stand the new Aptos font.  If I could send a terminator* back in time to kill the mother of the person who designed that font, I would be strongly tempted to do so.

But, wait, you might say.  Surely if I have access to terminator and time travel technologies, there must be other, less homicidal ways to change the basic font of a word processing program.  That may well be so, but violent matricide is all such a person deserves, I’m afraid.  Anything less would not convey the degree of my antipathy.  I’m inclined to say the entire family tree should be eliminated, but eventually the line of any living person intersects with the line of all people alive on the planet, so to wipe out the oldest ancestor would be to wipe out a common ancestor to all living humans, thus wiping out the whole human race.

Hey, wait, maybe that’s not such a bad thought.

While we’re at it, maybe we can go back over three billion years ago, to that warm pool about which Darwin spoke, and spray some Lysol, thus aborting all life on this planet.  I suppose life might start randomly again somewhere else, even if one did such a thing.  After all, it happened pretty quickly once conditions became conducive, implying that it might not do just to wipe out the spot where the ancestors of all actual modern life began, but might instead be necessary literally to sterilize the whole planet.  But how do you do that if even the collision with Theia that is the presumed origin of the moon didn’t do it?

Still, while the origin of basic life seems to have been a strong or at least a rapid tendency, the formation of eukaryotes and then multicellular life seems to have been much harder, taking another two and a half to three billion years after the earliest life to evolve on the planet.  So maybe, if a different proto-life had formed, life would never have progressed beyond something like bacteria.

Okay, well, I think I’ve made it clear that I don’t like Aptos.  And now that I’ve finished the first draft of Extra Body, I think I may in future switch over to using Google Docs for my word processing.  I hate unnecessary change in the first place—such as all the tweaks and upgrades and nonsense that all the apps and systems are constantly enacting, and the changes in WordPress that nearly always make the platform less convenient—but when they are changes for the worse, I really cannot abide them.

What misguided notions led Microsoft to think that their weird little new font with its curlicues and malformations of letters would be an improvement?  Can entire software companies develop global degenerative neurological conditions?  Or is it just a matter of the second law of thermodynamics, ensuring that any local cleverness is an ephemeral exception?

Just look what’s happened to the United States.

Anyway, as I mentioned above, I have completed the first draft of Extra Body as of yesterday morning.  I did not write on Friday, because I really felt like crap, mentally.  I honestly suspected that my brain was crashing, experiencing a burgeoning system failure (speaking of degenerative neurological conditions).  But then, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings, I wrote a total of 5,599 words, bringing the final first-draft tally to 80,676 words, at 123 pages.

I don’t know if the tale is any good, but it’s certainly impressively long for something that was imagined as a short story.  I’m going to take a very brief break before I begin my intended draconian editing process, during which time I mean to transcribe what I’ve typed so far of HELIOS** into a spiral bound notebook so that when I get to the appropriate stage, I can just continue writing that first draft by hand.

Of course, this is all extremely speculative.  I don’t expect that it will come to fruition, because I know that I simply cannot survive as my life is and—more importantly—as I am.  In case you can’t tell, I’m constantly almost completely defined by tension and hostility (though I do my best never to allow them actually to be released unjustly; I may almost always wish to wipe out all life in the universe, but I almost never do it).  The world, the planet, the biosphere, what have you:  none of it seems natural to me, none of it seems good or beautiful or welcoming.

I feel like I’m already in some Lovecraftian otherverse, not just a stranger in a strange land but an alien entity in an alien universe, where there are not even an integer number of spatial or time dimensions.  I truly sympathize with Agent Smith in the original The Matrix, when he says, “I hate this place, this zoo, this prison, this reality, whatever you want to call it, I can’t stand it any longer.  It’s the smell—if there is such a thing—I feel saturated by it…”

Of course, I don’t think he was literally saying that it was solely the smell that bothered him.  This was merely the metaphor, the shorthand, the figurative focus of his antipathy.  The sense of smell is merely the most elemental, the oldest, the most direct sense, and it tends to elicit the most visceral responses.  Even bacteria can be said to “smell” the world.

Lest anyone be fooled, I want to make clear that it’s not politics and social dysfunction and the like that make me so antipathic toward the world, though politics is pathetic and contemptible.  But politics—including dishonesty, hypocrisy, willful stupidity, delusion, political violence, and all such manifestations of primate dominance hierarchical jockeying—has always been pathetic and juvenile and worthy of sneers and nausea (as well as occasional mordant, contemptuous laughter).

Anyway, that’s about a thousand words in this post already.  I could go on and on spewing vitriol, but I don’t think it would make much difference.  I don’t know how I can possibly survive as I am, as things are.  More to the point, I don’t know why I would possibly survive as I am, as things are.

The world is disgusting, my life is almost entirely uncomfortable and frankly painful, and above all, I find myself disgusting.  I try to distract myself with writing, and with some music, and with studying physics and mathematics and languages, using various books and apps and so on.  I even pretend I have friends by watching YouTube videos of people reacting to songs movies I like.  But nothing is fun.  And none of my chronic pain and sensory issues have improved.  And don’t even get me started on insomnia!

Oddly enough, I think I would feel less alone if I were truly the only person on the planet, or if I were a castaway on an island.  Perhaps I’m wrong, of course; that is purely speculation.  But it feels like it would be the case, and that’s not a good feeling.

Well, I hope (and suspect) that most of you are doing and feeling better than I am.  That almost has to be a good thing.  Please take care of each other and yourselves.  Despite all the people and things I feel that I might wish didn’t exist, or that could be obliterated, you are among the rare few to whom that doesn’t apply.

TTFN

*As in the movies created by James Cameron, not the line that separates night and day on an astronomical body illuminated by a star.

**A little less than 3,000 words.

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That but this blog might be the be-all and the end-all here

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time once again for what has become once again my weekly blog post.

I miss doing daily posts, but it’s hard to fit them in along with writing new fiction and the like.  I could probably do it, but that would pack the time before work every day, and probably would overflow into the beginning of my usual work time, and I’m already always so tired from pain and insomnia and anxiety and depression.

I’ve even been doing a very modest amount of guitar playing, though the arthralgia/arthropathy in the base of my thumbs, and in my other fingers as well, has made that frustrating.  There are songs I could play quite well before that I’m having trouble playing now, though I’ve been insistently practicing them out of frustration and stubbornness.  I suppose it doesn’t matter; it’s not as though anyone else is ever likely to hear me play guitar again.

I also don’t really see the point to the daily blogs.  I’ve occasionally used them as rants to express some of my thoughts on things that were irritating me, but though I put those thoughts out into the world, I doubt that they have ever had any impact at all on any issue.  But to a greater degree, I had hoped that the blog would serve as a kind of therapy and a cry for help at the same time.

Perhaps the therapy part worked occasionally.  I am still alive for the moment, though I don’t necessarily call that a success, since I seem to feel steadily more anhedonic with every passing moment.  Every day is dominated by discomfort, physically and mentally, and there are very few compensatory positives in my life.  No change I can envision making on my own seems likely to improve anything…at least no change I have the wherewithal to make.

Obviously, the other, related purpose I mentioned for my daily blog (the “cry for help” part) hasn’t played out.

I guess it’s a bit like those whistles they attach to flotation devices on airlines, for you to use if you have a “water landing” and actually survive.  You can blow them and…I guess, what, alert the coast guard or whomever is searching for you?  But that assumes someone is searching for you and knows where to look for you, and can even hear that pathetic little whistle in the middle of the ocean.  It’s laughable.  I guess it’s more “cry for help theater” than it is a cry that might succeed in summoning help.

That’s the way it is, I suppose.  Everyone is helpless and adrift, some of them are just more deluded than others.  It’s those who are most able to be objective, by choice or by nature, who tend to be more depressed, not just because the universe is vast and civilization so puny, but more because almost all humans imagine that they are important to the universe.  It’s not necessarily bad if they think that they have the potential to become important—that’s not necessarily delusional (as discussed in David Deutsch’s book, The Beginning of Infinity).  No, they imagine that they are currently important.  They imagine that their moment in human history, let alone cosmic history, is the crux of causality, and many of them believe that the very universe itself was created so that they (or those like them) could exist.

Pathetic.

In their self-importance, they cause so many problems.  This in itself is not inexcusable; no one can foresee all possible outcomes of any actions.  But then, instead of seeking the means to fix problems that arise, many of them seek to blame the problems, to find scapegoats, whether among other people or among imagined supernatural devils and demons, because of course, since the universe was made for them, they could not have caused the problems.

Ugh.  Let’s get off that train of thought.  It’s too frustrating.

It’s July 11th today, which in the American date ordering fashion is 7-11, so there are no doubt specials and sales going on in the international convenience store chain 7-Eleven®.  Enjoy them if there are branches near you and if you like that kind of thing.  You can probably get a deal on a Slurpee® or something similar.

Now let’s briefly discuss my fiction writing, going back to the original intended subject of this blog*.  I have written a decent amount this week:  4,824 words since last tally, bringing the total to 75,070 words.  That’s 114 pages long in the current format.

I am within striking distance of the end of the story, though it may seem that I’ve said that before.  But in this case, I am literally on the cusp of the final major event of the tale.  It’s not impossible that I could finish the first draft within this coming week, barring (as always) the unforeseen, and assuming I write some on every workday.  I am not scheduled to work this Saturday, so there will be fewer days for writing than last week, but when stories get near to their climaxes, I tend to write a bit more, daily.  It’s even possible that I’ll write more this week, though there are fewer writing days, than during this last week.

Then will begin the editing process.  I may also start writing HELIOS, which I intend to do with pen and paper, since I think most of my best books have been written in first draft, solely or substantially, by that means.

As for everything else—well, there is nothing else.  I have no friends (other than work acquaintances), no nearby family (at least no nearby family with whom I speak or who want to see me), and no real hobbies other than this writing and my minimal guitar piddling around.

There’s basically nothing I do for fun.  There are a few things I do for distraction, but they end up annoying me because they draw me away from doing things I would feel better about, like learning more physics and mathematics and languages and computer science and so on.

I’m reading a tiny bit of fiction, but I can’t do very much of it, since it often exacerbates my depression.  When I read stories, I tend to be very much pulled into their mindset and worlds, but there are almost always multiple characters in any story, and there are usually friendships and social interactions, and after I stop reading them, I’m left feeling the relative coldness and emptiness of daily life more acutely than before.  That may be a big part of why I haven’t easily been able to read fiction in recent years.

Be that as it may.  I expect I shall probably write another blog post next week, though I make no promises.  I can’t promise ever actually to publish even Extra Body, let alone HELIOS or any other of the dozens of stories for which I have ideas waiting in idea-space.  But I seriously doubt that anyone would be much the worse for that lack, anyway.

I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  I may have a tendency to misanthropy and even pan-antipathy, but the people who read my stuff can’t help but hold a special place in my heart (meaning my mind).  So I do honestly wish you all well; indeed, I wish you the best possible lives and days available to you.

TTFN

[Side note:  I doubt anyone noticed, but last week’s post was exactly the same number of words long as the Declaration of Independence is purported to be, counting signatures and title.  You’re welcome.]

*It was meant as a form of promotion for my fiction.  As someone who is not good at self-promotion, partly due to an essential and apparently inherent self-hatred, it was the best I was able to do to try to get word of my books out into the wider world.  If you’re interested in looking at and considering reading some of my already-published fiction, you can either look at the My Books page of this blog or go to my Amazon author’s page.  Of course, I would welcome anyone who wants to read my fiction, and would also welcome feedback about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TTFN

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

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

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June 1st writing report

It’s the beginning of June, and a day that, by rights, should be a global holiday.  Perhaps someday it will.

Today I wrote 1,227 “block”* words on Extra Body, and the “Net” word count was almost identical:  1,228.  That’s less than a tenth of a percent difference, which is kind of cool, since I did make quite a few changes as I reread the previous 3 pages of writing to get me into the swing of writing today.

The total word count of the story is now 50,798, so it’s no one’s idea of a short story.  I don’t know, I just am not great at making stories short.  I increased the line spacing from 1 to 1.15 yesterday (or perhaps it was on Wednesday), because it’s easier to look at.  At the time, this changed the total page number from 71 to 74, which is nothing like a 15% increase, as one might expect from a naïve formula for how the page number relates to the line spacing.  I’m not sure what makes it so different, though.

Of course, the type size doesn’t change, only the space between lines of type, and that’s relatively small, to start with, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that it makes such a relative small difference.  It’s like the universe expanding overall but galaxies and galaxy clusters, being gravitationally bound, do not expand, only the space between them does.  When they are still close together, the change is relatively minor.  Of course, if the line spacing in my work were to increase exponentially, the space between lines would very soon come to dominate completely the fractional change in size, as is so with the universe, and then the page number change would track more closely with the spacing change.  But it would be pretty nuts to decide to increase the line spacing in a story.  Who would want to witness the heat death of the novella, after all?

Ah, well, all that doesn’t matter much.  But it does mean that, now, the story is over 80 pages long, and I think it may reach (or even exceed) a hundred before I’m through with the first draft.  It’s not quite going the way of Outlaw’s Mind (which started as a short story idea and became way more than expected) but it’s still really something.  I can’t make myself feel bad about it, though.  I mean, I’m frustrated that it’s taking so long, but the story has to be what it is, and I can’t make it otherwise.

I hope you all have a good weekend.  I should return on Monday, barring–as always–the unforeseen.  

 

 

*If you would like to see the definition of this term as I use it, I describe it in my reply to a comment on yesterday’s post.

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If Tuesday morning is like this, and Tuesday afternoon is never-ending…

It is Tuesday morning, the 28th of May in 2024 AD or CE, depending on how you prefer to write it.  I suppose it doesn’t really matter much to me; I’m okay either way.  I only first encountered the designation “CE” by the time I was in college (or “university”‒again depending on your preference), but I get why people use it.

I guess it’s probably silly to think that anyone should care whether I indicate what calendar era it is in which I’m writing.  I don’t suppose anyone would think I was writing a blog post in 2024 BC (aka “BCE”).  How would one even know toward which year one was counting down, if one were writing such dates?  Still, who knows how dates may change in the future, and whether someone might stumble across my blog posts in some unguessed age, on some weird, digital archaeological expedition.

How will such searches of the past even happen in the future?  If we advance beyond our current kind of online and personal storage, what would even happen to the data presently on the Internet and web and cloud and whatnot?  Heck, if all power went out for a significant amount of time in the near future, I would suspect that much of the stored data on the net might be lost.

Of course, quantum information will be conserved, if we understand that part of nature as well as we seem to understand it.  But the fact that it exists is not the same as being able to recover it.

Online is not forever.  Even if the actual data related to something sticks around, there will be so much other data that it will be as invisible as a single leaf in the Amazon rainforest as seen from space.  Perhaps far more so.  Very little that happens online is salient to anyone even as it happens, let alone after much time has passed.

Anyway…I’m writing this post on my phone in the back of an Uber heading to the office, because I again slept horribly last night, despite taking melatonin early in the evening.  I don’t know what to do about this sleep problem.  As John at the bar said to Bill*, I believe this is killing me.  And I don’t think I’m being melodramatic or hyperbolic**.

I mean to write at least a little bit of fiction this morning, but my last experience using the laptop computer in the backseat of an Uber was unpleasant.  To be honest, though, just about everything is unpleasant now.  There’s little if anything that brings me even transient joy.  There is occasional, momentary escape in the form of humor, for instance, but even that is becoming more and more difficult.  Mainly, I just feel ridiculously tense and guarded and tired and in pain pretty much all the time, or at least the vast majority of it.

I don’t want to keep doing this.  It’s just not worth it.  Nothing I do and nothing about me is worthwhile.

<sigh>  I’ll add an addendum about my fiction writing before I post this.

***

Well, I wrote 798 “block” words and 799 net words, which means that when I reread stuff today I added a word relative to the previous state of the story.  Still, like yesterday, it seems the difference is only one word, so I’m well below the roughly 3% difference seen in the past.  I don’t know if that’s good or bad or merely a neutral fact.

I could feel how foggy and vague I was while writing, so I forced myself to keep it short.  Actually, I had to force myself to write as much as I did, which was one page.  I’m not sure what my average page number per day has been since I started.  Most days that I write, I write well over one page and usually over two pages, but there have been many non-writing days, so it may average about one a day.  It’s a bit over 45 pages long so far, if memory serves.

No, that’s dead wrong.  It’s actually 70 pages long (I just checked).  That can’t be just a page a day, can it?  Have I been working on this story for more than two months?  I can’t remember.  If anyone out there has been paying attention, please let me know.

Okay, well, that’s enough of that.  I’m done for the day, at least on this stuff.  I feel like I’m done for everything else, too, but of course, the workday hasn’t even really gotten started.  I’m so tired.  This has to end soon.  Everything hurts, and nothing is beautiful, to reverse Vonnegut’s famous quote, as I like to do (I think I’ve done this recently, haven’t I?).  I only even keep moving at all out of habit.  I need just to lie down, figuratively, and let the elements*** take me.

I guess we’ll see if I’m strong enough to do that.  Meanwhile, all of you please have a good day.

*In the song Piano Man by Billy Joel

**As far as I know, I’m Euclidean.

***Or the elephants.  I’m not picky.

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And writers say, the most forward bud is eaten by the canker ere it blog

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, so it’s time for my Thursday blog post.  There will be no fiction from me today, other than such ordinary, day-to-day fiction as pretending to be doing better than I really am, as well as using money to buy things*.

I’m writing this on my phone, since I didn’t bring the laptop computer back to the house yesterday.  I was wiped out, and stressed out, and I didn’t feel like carrying any more than necessary.  I did get a bit of walking in, since I had to stop at the store on the way back.  I guess that was good, though something in the way I moved caused a blister on the medial side of my right big toe.  It’s not too bad, but I’ll probably not do any serious walking today.

It’s often questionable why I bother.  Of course, I would like to lose weight and whatnot; I would rather not die the physical travesty that I currently am.  But the best way to do that would be to stop eating completely.  That would be a win-win situation, as the cliché goes.  But that is very difficult to do in ordinary, day-to-day life in the modern United States.

I got a terrible night’s sleep again last night.  It wasn’t as bad as my one-hour night earlier in the week, but it wasn’t a whole lot better.  I’ve been trying to restrict my caffeine intake to the relatively early morning, just to make sure that doesn’t interfere with my sleep, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference.

I haven’t read anything much in quite a while.  I think it’s been over a month since I read any book, fiction or nonfiction.  I have been doing some stuff on Brilliant dot org, as I’ve mentioned here, but yesterday I didn’t even feel like extending my “streak” by doing some simple work in their computer programming course.  For one thing, the constant prods to “extend one’s streak” are thoroughly irritating.

I really despise all the manipulative tactics undertaken by these companies to get people to keep using their sites.  Even Kindle does it.  I had a “streak” of something like 170 or more weeks of reading pretty much every day on my Kindle app, but that’s now been broken, and already Amazon isn’t even recommending any e-books to me.

Still, it’s not as though I ever read to maintain a “streak”.  I read because I want to read.  Except right now I don’t.  I don’t even want to read my own stuff.

I did practice a little on the guitar yesterday.  I guess that’s something.  And, as you all know, I’ve been writing fiction now for a total of over twenty days (counting only writing days).  But it feels almost disloyal to be writing without reading, though it’s only myself that I’m betraying, and I don’t like myself, anyway.  Still, reading has been a fundamental part of my identity for literally as long as I can remember, and not being able to do it makes me feel very much adrift and puzzled.

It’s getting seriously hot and muggy down here in Florida.  I’m sweating significantly and quite visibly just sitting at the train station.  I suppose, if climate change persists, Florida will at least reap what it has politically sown, since both the heat and the sea levels are likely to drive quite a lot of people out of the state, and make much of the coveted ocean-front property into literal and figurative underwater real estate.

I’m not the sort to laugh in malicious glee when people get their comeuppances; I’m much more the type to tighten my lips grimly and nod in affirmative contempt.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not ego-syntonic for me when people get fucked over because of their own arrogant stupidity.

I don’t expect to be around to see any of it happen.  And, honestly, I would not be disappointed if people actually make headway at fixing the problems and correct them in time to save even people who don’t necessarily deserve to be saved, because innocent and beneficent people will be saved along with them.

Human ingenuity is much rarer than people probably think; however, it is so incredibly powerful that it doesn’t take much of it to accomplish wonders.  I guess it’s worth it for there to be so much arrogant stupidity if that’s necessary or unavoidable in order for the occasional sparks of cleverness and even genius to be found.  But it would be nice if stupidity were more sexually unappealing than it is.  Regrettably, though, stupid people seem more likely to breed than smart ones, especially since the smart ones understand about planning and delaying reproduction, or even choosing not to reproduce at all.

Oh, well.  This is the tragic farce of life.  It can be funny if you like lowbrow slapstick in the vein of the Three Stooges.  Unfortunately, I’m not really a big fan of such things, so I don’t think I’m going to keep watching much longer.

All right.  Time to call this to an end.  My back is flaring up quite a lot, probably from yesterday’s walk, and it’s distracting me.  Please try to nurture cleverness and creativity at all levels, and please don’t feed the trolls in any sense.  They’re not worth it.

TTFN

*Yuval Harari famously pointed out that money is a “fiction”, though it is a useful and important one.  So is law and government and the very existence of rights and stuff like that.  Such things exist only in the minds and works of people.  Nature certainly recognizes no rights, unless you want to count the right to be wiped out if you don’t do what you need to survive.  Indeed, the world seems to promise only one thing:  eventually, you (as well as everything you would recognize as the universe) will die.  That’s probably a truly unalienable right.

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Monday morning report for 4-22-2024

I’m writing a quick blog post this morning before I write any fiction, just to pass the time while I ride into the office.  I had a fairly bad stomach bug this weekend, I don’t really feel up to riding the train, and I didn’t bring my laptop computer back to the house with me on Friday.  I also did not work on Saturday, which is good, since I was busy throwing up.  Now I’m kind sore from all that, but the worst seems over, so I’m going to the office.

I mean to do my fiction writing on the laptop computer at the office this morning, mainly for tradition’s sake.  Though the smartphone writing has been pretty successful so far, I still want to write on the computer mostly.

Of course, the smartphone is a computer as well, but its keyboard isn’t nearly as well-designed for human-type hands to use‒thus all the software add-ons like auto-correct that are necessary to make it tolerable for most people to use.  As for me, I don’t like the auto-fill options, especially in word processing, though suggestions are sometimes useful when one is typing a long word.  Still, the fact that these systems seem to learn from the great masses of illiterati using them doesn’t reassure me.  The fact that the system keeps wanting to add an apostrophe when I’m writing the possessive form of “it” shows that it’s not getting its grammar suggestions from any formal guidelines, and so it’s actually miseducating people who are unaware of the apostrophe convention in this circumstance.

Most people probably don’t pay much attention, of course, so I suppose that’s not a very big worry.

I have a bit of a headache from all my queasiness and such this weekend‒at least, I suspect that’s the source‒so I’m not going to make this much longer.  I will come back before I post it and add a summary of the writing I’ve done today on my fiction.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week, and for those who celebrate it, have a good Passover (it starts tonight).

***

Well, even though I’m not feeling well, and had to lie down for a bit in the middle, I wrote 1952 words on Extra Body this morning.  But now I’m quite discouraged, because my coworker with whom I share responsibilities is not going to be in today, since his back is acting up.  I can’t fail to sympathize‒my back has been acting up for just over 20 years, so I know how bad it can get.  But it’s discouraging, since I really still don’t feel well, and was thinking of ducking out early, today.

I guess there will be no rest for the wicked, of which I am surely one.  At least I got some decent writing done.

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Be sure to warm up before kipling

Here I am at the train station, to which I arrived quite a bit later than I ought to have done, because Uber switched drivers on me twice, meaning I was assigned to 3 different people, resetting the waiting clock each time.  Then the last driver didn’t follow the route recommended by his own company’s app, apparently thinking that taking the interstate would be faster.  Long experience with the area leaves me with the knowledge that the route that the app recommended really is the fastest route, especially at this time of day.  I was very tempted to give the driver a low tip and a low rating, but since I recognized that some of my animosity is due to matters outside his control‒specifically, the changed drivers‒I would not let him bear the brunt of the consequences.

I need to quit taking Uber.  I’ve curtailed my morning walk for now‒working on a different form of exercise‒because it’s been causing my left knee to act up with greater and greater severity.  But taking the bus to the other train station adds nearly an hour to my commute, or at least it makes me get to the office an hour later.  It’s very frustrating.

Obviously, I’m not writing any fiction today.  I’m not really doing much of anything that matters at all to me today (except, perhaps to a small extent, this blog).  I don’t think I’ll write fiction or play guitar or sing or study any interesting subject today.  By yesterday already, I was too drained and distracted to be able to consider focusing on studying any mathematics or physics or whatever, even just by watching videos.  Ear plugs and hearing protectors don’t help noticeably.

Today, I think I’m going to use double ear plugs in each ear.  They’re the little squishy, compressible, throw-away earplugs, so they can be rolled down to small enough size to insert even when doubled, I’ll wager.  I’m not terribly fond of having crap stuck in my ear canals, but it’s better than being exposed to all the loud voices and noises.  At least, I suspect it is.

You’re probably wondering why I keep going to the office and back and all that.  It’s a fair question, but the answer is neither profound nor very interesting:  it’s just all I have.  I can’t see myself trying to find a different job.  At least I know the people at this job, and I even like most of them.  And I’m at least used to the place where I live.  It’s decent.

I am frustrated about the fiction writing thing, though.  I haven’t even bothered taking the laptop computer back with me at the end of the day so far this week.  I know I’m not going to use it.

I sometimes wish I’d never started doing this daily blog, but it seems I don’t want not to do it.  It’s my pathetic little scent-marking on the world, I guess, though it’s probably not very interesting most of the time.  For instance, I doubt many people enjoyed my weird asides about cosmology yesterday.

It’s hard to remember writing much of Son of Man on my tiny old smartphone back in the day, but I know I did.  I think I didn’t do indenting, but instead just did double line breaks for paragraphs and then corrected the layout after the draft was done.  I suppose, in principle, I could do that here also, but I fiddled with it last week at one point using the Word mobile app, and found it very unsatisfying.

Of course, I did not use Word to write the initial part of Son of Man.  I used the notepad function on my smartphone at the time, which is reasonably impressive, even to me.  But it would seem a shame not to use my laptop computer, now that I have it.  I suppose I could bring it with me and write fiction in the morning before even leaving the house, and take the southbound bus to catch the northbound train‒that bus route doesn’t begin until far too late for the early trains.  I hate the idea of arriving so late, though, especially since I’m awake anyway in the very early morning, no matter how much trouble I have falling and staying asleep.

I really hate my life, to be honest.  I’m sure you picked that up by now; it’s not as though I’m being particularly subtle.  I’m just so tired.  I’ve lost almost everything that ever mattered to me.  What is it Kipling wrote, “If you can bear to hear the truths you’ve spoken / twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools / or watch the things you gave your life to, broken / and stoop build ’em up with worn-out tools…”?

If so, then…well, you’re probably just a stubborn idiot, I don’t know.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice poem, very stirring and well-written, and obviously quite memorable.  But at the end, your big reward for all the listed attributes is, “you’ll be a man, my son”.  That’s it?  You get to be “a man” according to the criteria set by Rudyard Kipling?  Well, bully for you, I guess.  I don’t even feel human, let alone that I’m a man according to a nineteenth century author and poet’s* judgment.  I frankly feel dishonest when I have to check the Captcha box that says I’m not a robot, for crying out loud.

Anyway, that’s enough of my shit for today.  Unless we’re all lucky and something kills me or severely injures me between now and then, I guess I’ll write another blog post tomorrow, and I’ll probably be no closer to solving my difficulty with fiction writing than I am today.

I hope you’re all doing as well as you can do.

*He was a good one, though.  Gunga Din, The Jungle Book, all that kind of stuff was not half bad.