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.
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.
It’s Saturday, and hopefully most of you reading this are doing so from your homes, relaxing‒sipping your favorite beverage, perhaps‒and enjoying your weekend.
As I begin writing this, I am at the train station, waiting for the first morning train to bring me to the office. This is my third Tuesday-Thursday-every-other-Saturday blog post. It seems that, so far, fewer people are reading the blog on the days when I post it than usually had read it when I posted “daily”*. I don’t know whether this trend will continue‒three data points is not a great basis from which to extrapolate, unless you’re picking out a plane by getting three non-collinear points. I am not doing that, so it would be premature of me to pay too much attention to the statistics that WordPress throws in my face when I log in.
I walked to the station yesterday, and then‒since I had brought my laptop computer with me‒I wrote a bit on Extra Body while on the train. It felt like a very small amount, but it was about 750 words, which is not terrible for the length of a train ride. I get the idea that only writing roughly a page at a time, especially only three days a week, really will make me write faster stories, because I’m impatient to get to the end. But I’m not sure it’ll make the story any better. I don’t know if maybe I should try to write fiction every day and then, during the day, write blog posts on my phone, the way I’m writing this one. It’s hard for me to do fiction on my phone**, largely because of indentations and quotation marks and all that stuff. But these blog posts seem okay, more or less.
I don’t know what the best thing to do is. This blog is really my sole daily communication with the outside world; it’s not as though I have any friends with whom I hang out, and I cannot do online groups or what have you. I considered joining some “autism related” groups, though I am not at all sure I even merit the diagnosis, but they all seem to be run by and populated by people who are much more comfortable with other people they don’t already know, at least online, than I am.
Also, the whole thing feels almost faddish and cliquey, like “all the cool kids are joining autistic support groups”, which is fairly ironic, when you think about it. Anyway, I’ve never really been good at “defining” myself by any group membership, other than my core group of friends, back when I had such a thing, and of course my original family, and then, of course, even more strongly by my married family, with my wife and kids. But I’m no longer a member of that latter group, and the first group doesn’t exist anymore, and unfortunately, though I do talk to my sister on the phone and text and stuff with my brother, they live 1100 and 1300 miles away, roughly, so my original family is rather scattered.
I used to feel almost like a member of the community at Jerry Coyne’s website, Why Evolution is True, but that site’s parameters have changed, and it’s not possible to read and like and comment all from the WordPress “reader function”, so I have to open each post in at least 2 tabs to be able to interact with the site fully, and that discourages me a lot of the time. Anyway, I’ve long had the impression that PCC(E) found my comments irritating. Likewise, I almost always find any comments I make on that site or anyplace else to be stupid and embarrassing if I look back on them, unless they’re just jokey throw-aways, like a funny-oid response to someone’s tweet.
I’m not sure what to do about all this. No matter what, I feel like I’m spitting into the ocean or shouting in a hurricane. Maybe I’m not even shouting; maybe I’m whispering. Anyway, I don’t think it’s reaching very far or having any benefit, whether for me or for anyone else. I guess I occasionally get to “show off” my familiarity with a very broad array of concepts and ideas and fields of study; that’s ego-syntonic in and of itself, I suppose, though the fact that it is ego-syntonic for me is rather embarrassing and even humiliating. I mean, just how pathetic am I that I need to show off online in some blog that barely a dozen or so people even look at when I post it?
Still, it’s not as though I’m in some academic setting, where I could bounce ideas off colleagues and so on. I guess I could try to get back into doing my “audio blogs” which are sort of mini-podcasts, but the process of dealing with audio and converting it to video is a pain in the ass. I don’t think many people “watch” them, anyway.
Speaking of audio recordings, I have done audio recordings of two “chapters” (so far) of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible. I guess that’s good. It’s at least “forced” me to muscle through part of the book. It’s not that the subject matter is hard‒so far it’s old hat, really, since he’s laying the foundations‒it’s that the print is small on the hardcover edition, and the Kindle version is just a PDF of that, so you can’t adjust the type size to suit your smartphone, not without expanding the page until most of it is off your screen. That’s no way to read a book, especially one about a relatively complex subject.
Anyway, if I can keep it up and finish it, I may do something similar for some of my other books that don’t have audio versions, like Spacetime and Geometry and Gravitation and so on. I don’t think doing audio for mathematics texts would be terribly useful, but maybe it would. Maybe I’m fooling myself about all of it.
Oh, but I’m pleased to report that there’s now an Audible version of Rationality from AI to Zombies, and I used my credit this month to get it. I’m in the midst of rereading the Kindle version of the book even now‒about 75% of the way through.
I don’t know what I’m going to do about the other stuff, but then, I don’t really know why I’m doing anything at all. I have no particular goal or purpose in mind. I certainly don’t look forward to anything, beyond just trying to find new stuff to learn about or to learn better, but it’s not as though I’m making any contribution to the world, or doing any good of any kind. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m just “a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics”, but I certainly don’t have much more consequence than any solitary wild pig.
That’s enough for now. I don’t need to write a post that’s twice as long just because I’m writing it half as frequently. Also, I’m getting close to my stop. I hope you all have a good weekend, and if you’re celebrating it, a happy Saint Patrick’s Day tomorrow. I mean to write fiction on Monday, but maybe I’ll do a blog on the phone afterwards, sometime during the day. I’m making no promises, so don’t act in reliance.
*I used scare quotes because I effectively never post on Sundays. There were a few times, way back in the day, when I posted on Iterations of Zero on Sundays, because that was supposed to be my blog that was not related to promoting my creative writing, but was to be about my various thoughts on science, philosophy, politics, psychology, and so on. I haven’t written very many posts on it over time, especially since this blog took over being a catch-all for whatever thoughts come to me on any given day after I just start writing and see what happens.
**Though I wrote a significant part of Son of Man on my first, tiny little smartphone, because I had no other choice. That was a great little phone, an LG from back when they still made them. Once, it fell about 12 feet onto concrete and the back popped off and the battery fell out, but that was it. It ran perfectly afterward, and the screen didn’t crack at all. Some of that is just down to physics‒smaller screens have less local torque and also can only resonate at higher pitched frequencies. Also, the back popping off and the battery popping out absorbed a lot of kinetic energy, so that was dissipated away from more sensitive things.
It’s Thursday, and so this is the second day of my planned new habit of writing posts on Tuesdays and Thursdays and every other Saturday. I don’t know how that pattern might affect my readership. Maybe it will lead to fewer people reading my stuff because it will be coming out less often. Maybe it will lead to an increase in readership because it will be a comparatively scarce resource, and that fact will both make people want to see it when it’s available and will make it less of a burden for people to commit to following it. Possibly, it will have no appreciable affect whatsoever, and any changes that happen will be related to other variables entirely.
It seems most likely that it will be some messy combination of those three broad categories.
I did some writing on Extra Body yesterday, which was the plan, even though I had slept very poorly and had to catch up on some things at work, for which I hadn’t been able to summon the energy on Tuesday. After my relatively upbeat morning post on Tuesday, I’m afraid my energy and my mood really crashed, and it’s very unclear to me why it happened, other than the rather broad and general global tendency on my part that makes me prone to such things.
While that is indeed a good description of aspects of my nature, it isn’t a very satisfying explanation for why things happen in specific ways on specific days, and it doesn’t allow me to make any choices about what actions to take based upon it. As Eliezer Yudkowsky might put it, it doesn’t let me squeeze the future into any particular path, so it’s not useful.
Anyway, it was a very rough day, and several times just sitting in the office, I grappled with the urge to start crying, and several times I thought‒out loud in my head, as it were‒the words, “Somebody, please, help me.” Of course, no one could hear my thoughts, so no one did offer any help. It was a general, global request, or plea, anyway, not one specific to that day or time.
Getting back to writing fiction, though: I wrote well over 1500 words, which was a little over two pages in the format I have now on Word, which I think is perhaps different than it used to be. I don’t recall 750 words per page being usual, but maybe it was.
I had forgotten, I must admit, how much more relaxed it can be to write one’s pages for the day and not be expected to publish them that same day, in contrast to what I do when writing this blog. I simply wrote a couple of pages of the story, and I could have written more, and then I was done with that writing for the day. Sure, I’ll need to come back to it and edit it later‒I’ll do that a lot. But on any given day, the process has a sense of relatively pain-free closure.
I even puttered around on the guitar for a few minutes after that, as a sort of nostalgic indulgence. I used to do that most every day after I finished my three to four pages of draft writing.
With the blog, writing and then editing and then posting and sharing and all takes up much more time, and it seems to be more enervating. No offense intended. Maybe it’s a bit like drawing a daily comic strip, but drawing and releasing it on the day, every day. That could be done, in the modern world, but I don’t think many comic strip creators would like it, and I think it would probably burn them out before long.
Still, at least people seem to read my blog. If we compiled every individual instance of a single person reading any one of my fiction works‒meaning if someone has read three of my works, that counts as 3 instances‒you might have fewer instances than the number of people who at least look at my blog on any given day. Certainly the number of people who have bought my books isn’t even within an order of magnitude of the people who subscribe to my blog.
Either way, I guess it doesn’t make much difference in the long run. All these moments (and words) will be lost in time like tears in the rain, as Roy Baty said.
I did walk to the train this morning, though I did not do so yesterday, fearing the time loss it would entail. That lack of exercise didn’t help or hinder my mood as far as I can tell, but it was probably good for my recovery, because today was easier. I mean to keep doing this, as I’ve said, and eventually to add the walk back to the house as well. It’s good for my health, it makes me “stronger”, and it gives me time to listen to educational podcasts and audible books on science and related topics. I may even‒since there is no Audible version available‒read aloud and record Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible for myself so that I can listen to it later. Just the reading will likely get the concepts into my head well, and then relistening will cement them.
If that works, I may do it with other deep books that don’t have Audible versions. I remember there used to be a service called “recording for the blind”, for which I briefly volunteered as a proof-listener, that provided audio textbooks for those who cannot see, and for which there are no braille versions (surely the supermajority of textbooks).
Anyway, that’s enough for now. I have things I want to do, and I have an appointment this morning for an irritating, bureaucratic process that I have to do, or at least that will make certain other things simpler. Just the prospect of it fills me with paranoia and stress. I hope you have a good day. And, since I am working this weekend, I expect to write a post on Saturday.
It’s Monday morning again, against almost everyone’s better judgement. I’m sitting at the train station, but I’m not entirely sure that I’m on the correct side to board my train. They’re playing an automated announcement that the northbound train is boarding on the track 1 platform and the southbound train is boarding on the track 2 platform—which is switching the normal sides—but it’s not saying the specific train numbers that are switching, which it usually does. I’m going to have to pay some attention to any changes in these announcements, but I’m currently waiting on the normally southbound side.
It’s very annoying to have to deal with these seemingly pointless incongruities and alterations so early on a Monday morning. I don’t feel at all rested from the weekend; I feel physically very tired, as well as mentally and emotionally so.
It would be nice if the Tri-Rail people could just make it clear if there’s going to be an ongoing pattern of switching sides in the morning for a while. It would be particularly nice if they could tell us what the reason for it is. That way we might even be able to estimate how long it’s going to keep happening and so not have to keep switching from one side to the other, ourselves.
It’s also an interesting fact to note that on the way back in the evening, the southbound train on which I ride at that time has been arriving on its usual side, so the switching is not continuing on into the evening at least.
I don’t know why they’re doing this. Possibly if I knew more about their train system’s workings and whatnot I might be able to come up with some reasonable hypotheses, but alas, I don’t know enough to make a good guess. As it is, it feels like some peculiar, train-related psychological experiment.
I’m going to try to keep these blog posts relatively short if I can—really aiming to keep them down to the 800-ish word count, which is my usual starting goal, but which I usually pass by 200 to 400 words on any given day. I want to try to preserve the extra time and energy I’ll need to do a little fiction writing every (work) day. Maybe I should set a new goal of 700 words.
I did do some writing on Extra Body on Saturday—probably slightly less than a full page, since I wrote until I got to the next page as my target, and I was about a half page in, but the story is already just shy of 3600 words long. As is usually the case, though it took significant mental effort to get going at first, by the time I was almost to where I ended up stopping I felt like I didn’t want to stop.
I’ve been resisting the urge to keep writing, though, because I’m trying to make the limited writing per day work for me to keep from getting carried away and writing too long a story. Paradox City was meant to be a “short story” and was handwritten in its first draft, but it was nevertheless something like 40,000+ words long. I don’t recall the exact length, but it’s not what would usually be called a short story; certainly it’s not the kind that might have been published in a magazine in the old days. But it’s not really quite long enough to be considered a novella.
I don’t know why I’m worried about that notion, though. I don’t know for sure that shorter stories are better or worse. I just know that, if I want to keep writing this blog, I can’t write as much per day on fiction as I used to write, since the blog takes up most of the time I would otherwise dedicate to fiction. And this blog is really my only regular manner of interacting with people in the outside world, apart from those at work. But work is noisy and lots of the things there don’t make sense and just make me feel uncomfortable, especially during the day when the “music” is turned up so loud.
I don’t know what I’m going to do about any or all of this. I don’t know why I should do anything at all, ever again. Probably I shouldn’t.
Oh, by the way, the southbound train just arrived on its usual side, so a bunch of people had to switch. And on the northbound side—to which I have switched back—I can see the green signal for northbound train traffic, so it seems that the plan is for the northbound train to arrive here. Apparently that announcement was just an automatic announcement that was left running from before.
It would make me feel a bit better if I knew at least that someone in the Tri-Rail system was embarrassed and chagrined because they realized they had dropped the ball on this issue, and that they resolved to do better from now on. However, I am by no means convinced that there is such a person.
Meanwhile, the tracker system online for the train doesn’t even show that my expected train exists, let alone which track it’s going to be using. It’s all very frustrating. Everything is frustrating, and there seems no reason to bother with any of it. If I had some goal or joy in my life, I’m sure I could tolerate and even laugh about all these things; goodness knows I’ve done so in the past. But when there’s no compensatory purpose or plan or hope for the future, all the little annoyances just wear me down.
My train is still not appearing on the tracker, but the next 2 ones are, and my train is already due to have arrived, but it’s not here. I think I’m going to give up on all this soon. It’s just the beginning of the week, and I’m already exhausted.
***
[P.S. My train did arrive on its appropriate side, and only about five minutes late, but it still doesn’t show up on the tracker, even as I’m riding it. How mysterious! Maybe I should write a story about a train that doesn’t show up on a tracker because it’s not really a normal train, but some trans-dimensional or spirit train or something. I don’t know. I’m sure that’s been done.]
It’s Monday morning again, as tends to happen around this time of week. I hope you all had a good weekend.
I’m starting this blog post at the house, where I’m waiting to see if the Uber prices come down a bit before deciding to take one. If they don’t, I may decide to walk to the train; it’s relatively cool out, and I feel physically rather energetic. I may even take the bus, though that’s a circuitous and irritating path. I’ll keep you posted about what happens.
…
Okay, well, the price dropped an acceptable amount, so I booked an Uber, but the estimated wait is 15 minutes, which is unusually long for this time of day. That further cements my plan to try to make sure to walk back from the train on the way “home” this evening. Yes, it will take longer even than waiting for an Uber, but it will cost less, it will have a lower carbon footprint‒though I will make many more actual footprints‒and it will also get me some good exercise. I hope you can all help keep me honest and maybe even spare some words of encouragement.
I have some good news to share with you today. It’s not momentous, but it means a lot to me. I did not start on HELIOS, but I’m happy to report that I’ve started something else. The prospect of beginning a new novel, even a “light novel” sci-fi story, was a bit intimidating, so on the other spiral-bound notebook, the one on which my cousin recommended I write a zombie story, I thought maybe I would write a short story. I didn’t intend to write a zombie story (sorry, Lance) since I don’t even really enjoy reading or watching such stories, but it’s still a good basic idea.
I opened up my old collection of story ideas, from which came more than one of my existing works, and scrolled down. Most of the ideas weren’t that gripping for the moment, but quite a way down the list I found an idea whose time, it turns out, had come.
I won’t tell you much about the story idea here, partly because I don’t have the full thing sketched out, but mostly because I don’t want to diminish my drive to write it. It’s called Extra Body, and no, it’s not a horror story. If anything, it’s a sort of lighthearted sci-fi short story, but set in the ordinary, modern world.
I wrote one page of it at work on Friday, and then yesterday‒yes, Sunday‒I wrote another page and a half. It’s almost, but not quite, unheard of for me to write fiction on a Sunday, simply because I habitually mandate that as a mental break day from writing fiction. However, since I’ve been on quite a prolonged mental break from writing fiction anyway, I decided to get in an extra day.
Also, instead of setting my usual daily goal of 3 to 4 pages of writing, I just set my goal to at least 1 page. That takes a lot longer when I’m writing “by hand” than it does when typing‒I can type a full 400 to 500 word page in a very short period of time‒but that’s okay. I’m hoping this pressure will keep me more concise than I often tend to be.
I must say, it’s good that I’m keeping the target low when writing by hand, because my hand muscles are deconditioned for writing much on pen and paper. Of course, my writing is also terribly messy, but that is nothing new. As I rediscovered yesterday, I can always read my own handwriting at least.
This shouldn’t be too long a short story, especially not for me. It’s not going to be terribly deep or thought provoking, just a bit of fun. Then, maybe, once I’m done with that, if I’m still around, I can start HELIOS.
Another thing, in closing for the day: I did in fact look up the chords and tabs for All Apologies only to find that, though it was originally played in a form of the “drop D tuning”, it’s just a 3-chord song (not counting sus-2 and 7th chords, which one usually does not). I decided to learn it using standard tuning, because I don’t like having to twiddle with the tuning of my guitar so much. This meant I had to figure out the main riff for myself, since the tabs are not really any help, being all in the original tuning. That wasn’t much work, though. It’s a nice sounding riff, but it’s actually quite simple.
So, since I had the guitar out anyway, I decided to look up the chords to Close to You, in preparation for possibly recording my parody, Antichrist. This song has slightly more chords than the other one, but unless you count the “truck driver” key change in the middle, it’s also really a pretty simple song.
I guess most popular songs are not all that complex. One can get spoiled when playing around with Radiohead and the Beatles, let alone with having played Bach on the piano (and cello), or having been in pit orchestras playing West Side Story and the like.
Anyway, as may be obvious, I’ve gotten a slight boost in my overall energy, partly from better allergy control, I think, so that’s good. I hope it continues. We shall see, I guess. For now, at least I’m being slightly productive. I hope all of you are feeling at least as well as I, and that you have a good week.
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.
[Spoiler Alert: Parts of the discussion below reveal aspects of the book that the first-time reader may not want to know…which, I suppose, is the basic definition of “Spoiler Alert”.]
Son of Man is the oldest of my published works—oldest in the sense that it’s the oldest of my story ideas that has been fully written and published. It is also oldest in the sense that it is the published book I started writing longest ago. I began it in the nineties, while I was in med school and was living in White Plains, New York. I don’t recall the exact amount that I wrote at the time; it may have been only the first five or six pages. But the book as it now exists begins with a scene almost identical to what I wrote then, reconstructed from memory, including the names of the first three characters introduced. The character Michael was also present in the original idea. I might have gotten as far as his introduction into the story at the time; certainly, his entrance, and even his initial words, have been fully present in my head for the last two decades. Continue reading →
The Chasm and the Collision is my currently published novel that has the most recent—and what might be thought inauspicious—origins. I came up with the idea for it while I was an involuntary resident of Gun Club Road, a period lasting eight months. It was a longer stretch of enforced restriction from most of the sources of intellectual stimulation to which I was used than I think I’ve experienced either before or since.
During that time, thanks to the help of my ex-wife, I was able to keep in contact with my children by calling them two days a week—though the calls were restricted to fifteen minutes at a time, and this was disheartening (though positively luxurious compared to my current interactions). My children were around eleven and twelve at the time, my son just entering middle school and my daughter in the latter year or so of elementary school. Continue reading →
“Paradox City” is the next story I wrote—or completed, anyway—after I finished the first draft of “Mark Red.” I say “completed,” because I actually began writing “The Chasm and the Collision” months before I started “Mark Red,” in apparent contradiction to what I wrote in my previous author’s note. But I had only written what were then the first and second chapters of “CatC,” which were eventually consolidated into one chapter, and had then put them aside. I also didn’t have them with me while I was a guest of the Florida State Department of Corrections. My mother, thankfully, had a printout of the chapters, and my intention was to complete that book once I had finished “Mark Red,” when I had worked enough of the rust from my writing gears. However, the chapters hadn’t arrived yet by the time I finished “Mark Red.” While I waited, I wanted to be productive and to maintain my daily early-morning writing habits, so I decided to write a short story. Continue reading →
