Fiction

by

Let airplanes circle screaming overhead

After my little test yesterday of the “writing a blog post directly on the app related to my WordPress account”, I considered writing this morning’s post directly on that app, just to see how it went.  However, I don’t yet know how to keep track of my word count on that app*, and I don’t feel like doing any trial and error exploration this morning‒not of that, anyway.

So, I’m writing this instead on the usual Google Docs app.  Google Docs has the advantage that when I write this document on my phone, it automatically saves to my Google Drive, and I can then readily open it up on any computer that has an internet connection.  That’s fairly handy.

Of course, it means that I’m putting many eggs in the Google basket, but for these purposes, I’m okay with that.  Also, when it comes to phone apps, Google Docs is so far the best word processor I’ve tried, as far as interface quality goes.  The same cannot be said for the desktop app, but it’s perhaps better than it used to be.

I don’t really like to leave my fiction in Google’s hands if I can help it.  I like having a hard copy, so to speak, of my fiction writing.  So far, except for those which were written with pen and paper for the first draft, all my fiction has been written on MSWord (and even the handwritten ones were completed on Word).  I used to recopy each file onto a thumb drive after a day’s writing, in addition to keeping it saved on my mini lapcom, so I knew I had at least two up to date copies.  Then‒once it became a thing‒it would also auto-save onto my Microsoft OneDrive.

The inception of the latter made me think that maybe I could write everything on the Word app for smartphones.  It auto-updates in a fashion similar to Google Docs.  Alas, it’s not nearly as fluid and seamless as the Google app.  If it were, I would probably use it, although‒the nature of Microsoft accounts being what they are‒I wouldn’t be able just to pull it up on the work computer, since it uses a different (boss-related) Microsoft account.  So, I would have to send a file as an email or something no matter what.

I’m sure there are ways around that‒or, well, there may be ways around that‒but the phone app for Word just is too cumbersome for now.  It’s not worth the effort.

Sorry, I know this is probably dreadfully dull to all of you.  I’m impressed that you’ve read this far.  You may know, I guess, that I don’t plan these posts out ahead of time, I just spew out whatever comes into my head.  If you find it tedious or infuriating, just imagine how I feel!  You, at least, could always navigate to another website.  What am I supposed to do?  I can’t even get away from myself by sleeping most of the time.

Anyway…

I’ve been doing a little bit of rereading of some of my fiction recently.  For instance, yesterday afternoon, while waiting for my train, I finished rereading The Chasm and the Collision.

I still like it.

I have a hard time feeling good about things that I do (and am) but I think CatC is a good story, and I think its world is interesting and that the characters are good and so on.  I think there are probably a lot of people out there who would like it.  And, like I mentioned sometime earlier this week, it would be really cool to encounter fanfiction based on it.

Alas, I am not good at self-promotion.  I don’t like myself, so it’s hard to find the will to promote my work, even when I like the work.  It’s quite dispiriting, and the fact that I can only hold myself, and my nature, responsible for it doesn’t make it any easier to swallow that bitter pill.

Now I’m rereading Unanimity: Book 2, though I’m not sure if I’ll read it all the way through to the end.  That’s another book that I think is good, though it is long, and some of the characters aren’t as likeable as in CatC.  Of course, they’re not supposed to be likeable, when they’re not.  It is a horror story, after all, and in many ways it is one of my two most horrifying stories.  Weirdly enough, those two most horrifying stories are my longest and my shortest works.

On the other hand, my sister recently pointed out to me that‒ironically‒my most lighthearted story is The Vagabond, which is a sort of old-school, gonzo horror story.  She’s right.  I guess that lightness shows that I wrote it (originally) while in college and med school.

The heck with it, all of my stories are good.  Some are better than others, and different people would surely prefer different ones, but I think they’re all pretty good.  Even the stuff only published here like Extra Body (which is complete) and Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado (those two are not complete) are good.  So read them.  Read all of my stories.  Tell your friends and families and even your enemies and strangers about them.  Spread the word far and wide across the land.  “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juice bone”.  Okay, well, maybe not that last bit, but do get the word out.

Thanks.

Okay, well, tomorrow I work, so expect a blog post tomorrow, whether you like it or not.  I may do another test post this afternoon if I get a bit bored, mainly to see if I can sort out the word count stuff on the app for WordPress.  If so, I’ll post it.  If not, of course, I won’t.  It’s funny how that works, isn’t it?

I hope you have a good day.

*I need to keep track of that because I can sometimes get quite carried away.

by

Had I but pens enough, and time…

Here we go again, again.  It’s Monday‒the last one in April this year‒and I’m writing another effing blog post.

I keep trying weird little things in the hope that they engender or otherwise encourage something positive in my life.  For instance, after briefly using a blue Bic® Round Stic™ pen on Friday, I realized that I had on some level missed writing with them.

I wrote Mark Red and The Chasm and the Collision, and the “short story” Paradox City all with blue and/or black medium Bic™ Round Stic® pens.  These were the only ones available through commissary up at FSP.  After a while, the guys who did tattoos would just give me new ones to use as long as I gave them back when empty/traded an empty one for the new one, so they could use them to make tattoo guns, and I went through such pens pretty quickly.

I thought to myself (since I have trouble thinking to anyone else*) that maybe if I started using these pens regularly again, I might help give myself the energy to start doing some new fiction writing.  So, I ordered a box of them, which is at least quite inexpensive, and I have one in my pocket now.

It’s a fairly childish notion, perhaps, but just because something is childish does not mean it’s wrong or bad.  Adults get rid of too many childish things‒sometimes on the advice of effing Saul of Tarsus of all the pathetic losers to whom to listen‒and adopt too many “adultish” things that are no more sensible, not as rewarding, and are reliably productive of negative outcomes.

Of course, some childish things do need to be left behind.  Ideally, one does not want to keep believing in Santa Claus or monsters in the closet or that stepping on a crack will break your mother’s back any longer than one must.  Wetting the bed is also worth stopping as early as one can.

But it can be good for one to keep asking questions about how things work and what they are and what they do and how they got to be the way they are, and being delighted in seeing and learning new things, and enjoying simple games and going outside and stuff like that.

Anyway, I doubt this particular choice of pens will actually get me to write any fiction again, but maybe it will at least feel good to use them again for a while.

As you know, I have at least a few stories, such as Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado that I have started that I’d like to finish, and I have some other stories on the back burner that I’d like to start and write.  If I could just find a patron to support me while I write, so I didn’t have to do anything else, I could probably do it.  But despite its name, even Patreon doesn’t really work that way.

People who support “creators” on Patreon pay regular, specified amounts and expect regular, piecemeal output (like daily blogs, for instance, though being the intellectually stunted populace that we are, people more often seem to want video stuff).  If I put up a Patreon, or a “Go fund me” thing (whatever the proper term for that is) I doubt that I would get a lot of people supporting me and just waiting while I work on a long form writing project.

If anyone wants to do that, and is able to do it, let me know.  Just remember, I’m slightly paranoid, so I will probably suspect some scam at first if you approach me‒unless I already know you, of course.

All of this is really just fantasizing, obviously.  I might as well request that the person who wants to be my patron for writing fiction is also a beautiful woman who is just my type (whatever that might be) and who wants to be in a long-term relationship with me.  Oh, and also, she owns a dragon, as well as an FTL spaceship.  Hey, maybe she’s a Time Lord and has her own TARDIS!

Actually, if I had the use of a TARDIS, it would probably distract me completely from writing fiction.  But I probably wouldn’t spend as much time (har) just traveling and having adventures as most of, for instance, the Doctor’s companions do.  I would want to learn how this technology works!

I don’t understand why none of the people who enter the TARDIS and gape at the whole “bigger on the inside” thing don’t right then and there ask how it works!  (Occasionally some do so, rather halfheartedly).

And when the trite little, dismissive answers such as Nardole gives are offered, they should say, “No, no, I mean how does it actually work?  What is the science and technology involved, how is it carried out and maintained?  What is the physics underlying it, how was it discovered, how was it harnessed?  Do you have any primers on that, any online courses, any textbooks, even any ‘how does it work’ for kids books?  And for that matter, how does the time stream and everything work, how is it traversed, what is the physics behind the functioning of the TARDIS?  We’ll get to the biology of regeneration in due time, but I want to understand all this.  To Hell with going and fighting Daleks or whatever, you can literally do that whenever you feel like, because you have a time machine!”

I guess it wouldn’t be a very fun show, just to watch someone studying Time Lord science and technology, but in real life, if I had access, I like to think that’s how I would spend a lot of my time.  And I think I think correctly.

All right, that’s enough stupid fantasizing for today, wouldn’t you say?  None of those or any other good things are likely to happen to me (some are far more probable than others, but none are worth betting on).

I am much more likely to keep developing new and harder to control pain and more frequently recurring and persistent pain and greater and greater frustration and despondency and depression until finally, at long last, it kills me.  Then, at least, everyone in the universe overall will be just a little bit happier.  On average, anyway.

*Though in a certain sense, this blog is an instance of me thinking to other people.  But that requires the other people to be active participants, and it certainly cannot be done all day every day or any such thing. 

by

Peculiar signs and pseudo-wonders

Well, as you probably know*, it’s Monday again.  I’m not excited about it either, believe me, but I was given no input into the matter, so don’t blame me.

As you may also know, I did not work this last Saturday, because several unexpected absences concatenated (I’m not sure that’s good usage) to make it pointless for the office to open, so we did not open it.  Instead, I took advantage of the day off and went on a bit of a trek.

I walked to the bank‒a new branch, or at least one I haven’t used in the past‒and then continued on a few more miles to the Yellow Green Farmers Market, which is quite a nice little place that’s only open on the weekends.

Just outside the market, I saw an amusing collection of signs that I suspect one would not ever see at a farmers’ market in the northeast.  I’ll insert a picture here.

Anyway, I was neither openly carrying nor carrying concealed firearms, and I used no bike, scooter, or skateboard, so I was fine.  I walked around a bit, had a lovely apple and ginger tea and three empanadas, then walked back toward the house by a different route.  Finally, I got back to the Hollywood train station, where I decided to get an Uber the remaining distance back.

I had already walked several miles, and I was rather fatigued.  I could also sense that I had gotten a bit sunburned (which I had).  Anyway, in the end, I walked almost exactly ten miles on Saturday.  This is based on agreement between my pedometer and the map estimate, so I think it’s reasonably accurate.

We used to say “close enough for government work” about things like that, back in the day, implying that governments don’t work very hard to get things too right.  However, nowadays, in the US at least, I feel that it would be better to say “too close for government work” because accuracy and precision, let alone duty and beneficence, seem to be anathema to our current administration.  Let us say as little as we may about competence.  That bit is just deeply embarrassing.

Let’s see, is there anything else that’s at all worth discussing?  I don’t know; “worth” is such a subjective concept.  In my subjective assessment, much of what I do on any day, in any week, in any year is of no worth whatsoever.

Not everything falls under that umbrella.  Everything I did that led up to my children being born is absolutely worthwhile to me.  Nor jot nor tittle would I change of it.  After that, though, things degenerated rapidly.  Again, this is from my point of view, but that’s the only one I can actually have.

I can imagine other points of view.  I can try to see things as if from another point of view, simulating other minds within my own.  So can you, probably.  It’s a very useful attribute shared by most naked house apes.  I think my own capacity to do so‒which is not inherently very good, it seems, probably due to my ASD‒was greatly enhanced by reading a lot of fiction starting from when I was quite young.

Reading is very different from watching a movie or a TV show or even a play, because with reading one can more or less literally “hear” the thoughts of the characters‒and I think this is one of the truly great things about written fiction.  I think if more people spent more of their lives, particularly in childhood, reading written fiction, the world would be, in consequence, a better place by most reasonable measures.

Unfortunately, for many people in the world, the only fiction they read is stuff like the Bible and the Koran.  Not that there’s anything wrong with reading them per se‒I’ve read parts of one and all of the other, myself‒but though they are anthropologically interesting, they are not terribly well written, nor are they coherent, nor is there any unity to their styles.

This is a bit puzzling, given some of the things the books claim for themselves.  Then again, politics frequently demonstrates that people don’t seem too worried about coherence and logic and quality, so one can say and claim almost anything one wants, and some people will embrace it.

DMX said, “Talk is cheap, motherfucker!”  Aye, that it is.  And yet, people will pay through the nose for it, and sometimes, the more worthless it is, the more eagerly they pay.

If given a choice between cheap but big and gaudy fake plastic jewelry and some truly valuable, rare gem that is subdued in character, people seem to pick the plastic nearly every time.  They do this even when they know the difference.  They cannot seem to resist the superficial bling.

Mind you, if it’s just for decoration, the superficial bling is okay as far as it goes.  Especially if it’s going to be transient, like holiday decorations, the cheap and gaudy stuff can be ideal, because one doesn’t have to worry about damaging it; it’s all about a look, an impression, anyway.

But when one wants something durable, something useful, something with depth, it’s best to work with things that are not mere surface shimmer.  One does not want to build factories and fire trucks and skyscrapers and farm equipment out of Papier-mâché, Elmer’s® glue, plastic beads, and glitter.

All right, I think that tortured chunk of rhetoric demonstrates that I have nothing further to say today that’s worth sharing.  Probably that’s true every day, from midnight to midnight.  Silence, I suspect, is probably my ideal mode.

*This is presuming** that most, if not all, readers tend to read my posts on the day they are released.

**I know, I know, when I presume I make a pres out of u and me.  And right now, a pres is not a prestigious thing to be, though there was a time in the past when it was.

by

Is it mean not to know if one’s writing is above average?

It’s Friday again, but that’s not much consolation, since the office is open tomorrow and I will be working, unless I am lucky enough to get very sick or very injured or to die or something.

As usual, I have no idea what would be good to write today.  Actually, goodness—certainly in the moral sense, but possibly also in the sense of quality—probably doesn’t have much to do with my blog.  Perhaps weirdness would be a better adjective/measure to relate to my writing.

I’m probably not an objective judge of such things.  Then again, I don’t know of any fully objective judges.  Still, there is some degree of variability involved in such things, as in nearly everything else made up of smaller, more fundamental parts that are interacting in complicated ways producing so-called emergent behavior.  Nevertheless, cognitive biases are reasonably well studied, as are many emotional blind spots and the like.  And it’s certainly true that I have a difficult time being objective about myself and about my work.

Oddly enough for such a self-despising person, I actually like my own writing, especially my fiction.  When I reread my stories I don’t tend to see them as horrible or wretched or whatever traditionally happens with “artists” who look at their own work.  I think at least some of that sort of thing is probably affected, since our society (perhaps semi-deliberately) looks down upon artists who think highly of their own art.

If only we did that with politicians; there’s an area where humility would be welcome and beneficial, I think.

Anyway, I tend to like my stories—I wrote them, after all, because I wanted to tell and thereby hear those tales—but I don’t necessarily think they’re great or good or decent from anyone else’s point of view.  I honestly don’t know how good or how bad they might be from nearly any others’ points of view, except my sister’s, and she’s probably almost as prone to be biased about my work as I am.

Though, again, my attitude toward my writing is not akin to that oft-noted personal bias that leads more than 90% of drivers to think that they are in the upper 50% in ability (i.e., above the median), which is a mathematical impossibility* for them actually to be.  I don’t think of my writing as better (or worse) than average or the median.

I don’t really compare my writing to anyone else’s.  I just tend to like it.  That’s probably a very good thing, because I have to edit it myself.  Even these daily blog posts are run through three more times after my first draft.  My fiction I tend to reread and edit seven times (that took a very long time with Unanimity).  Why seven?  Well, I had to pick a number, and once or twice is clearly too few, and thirteen would just be unworkable.

Also, with my fiction, I tend to follow advice Stephen King repeated in his book On Writing by working to reduce my final word count by at least ten percent by the time I’m done editing it.  I used to try to do that here, but I sometimes add a bit during editing, so that becomes quite difficult and hardly worth the effort.

All that being said, it would really be nice to get some feedback on my writing, especially on my stories (from people who have read them).  Of course, I would love it if someone loved my stories and told me so and told me why.  The closest I think I’ve come is a review on Amazon of Welcome to Paradox City that was written by a former high school friend (he has since died of cancer, sadly) who had actually honestly bought the book for himself when it came out.  He wrote that the three stories in that collection each made him wish they were the beginning of a whole book, basically implying that he wanted to know what happens next.

That’s a good thing about short stories—you can leave people hanging and that’s just “too bad” for them (though it can be enjoyable).  Short stories also don’t have to have “happy” endings, which is good for me, since only one of the three in the above collection ends happily in any reasonable sense.

Of course, as I’ve noted before, my short stories are rarely short enough ever to have been, for instance, published in a magazine in the old days.  The only real exception to this is Solitaire, which I don’t think any magazine would have published, because it is very, very dark indeed.

Okay, well, I guess I ended up writing something today, even if it was all just figurative omphaloskepsis.  I don’t know whether you readers consider this good or bad or ugly, or how it compares in your estimation to posts like I posted yesterday and/or the day before.  If you’re so inclined, please let me know.

And if you have actually bought and read any of my books, I do beseech you to leave me a review on Amazon (or wherever) if you get the chance.  Thanks.

I’ll write at you tomorrow, barring—as always—the unforeseen.

*It is not, on the other hand, impossible for 90% of people to be above average (i.e., above the mean).  I’m sure I’ve addressed this before, but imagine one had administered a test, and 100 people took it.  Imagine that 90 of those people got 51/100 on the test, whereas the remaining 10 people scored zero.  Then, the arithmetic mean (what people usually mean by “average”) would be (90 x 51)/100**.  That goes to 4590/100, or a mean score of 45.9.  So, 90% of those people scored above average.  That’s not saying much, but it’s true.

** Yes I know I don’t really need the parentheses there, but I’m leaving them in for clarity.

by

“‘Cause I’m your superhero. We are standing on the edge…”

Well, it’s Friday the 13th.  That’s at least one good thing about today.  And, of course, next month will also have a Friday the 13th, as I’ve noted previously (I don’t know specifically in which post I noted it, and I don’t really have the urge to go figure it out, so I’ll leave that to you to do if you’re interested).

It is slightly interesting to think about the fact that, on average, one of every seven Februarys will have a Friday the 13th, but not all of those will then lead to a subsequent Friday the 13th in March, because every 4th February will have 29 days*, by the Gregorian calendar, which is the one the world uses overall.

So, the total fraction of years with dual Fridays the 13th would be something like 1/7 minus a further ¼ of that one seventh—so 4/28 (i.e., 1/7) minus 1/28 (1/4 x 1/7), which leads us to the rough conclusion that only three out of 28 years will entail February and March each having a Friday the 13th.  That’s slightly less than one out of every nine years.  And since I’m 56, which is twice 28, I should have experienced about 6 such years in my life (perhaps counting this year).

Mind you, the numbers aren’t quite right overall.  The Gregorian calendar waives the extra day in February on years that are divisible by 100, i.e., the turns of centuries.  However, there’s a further exception to that:  the turn of a millennium, like what we all just had in the year 2000, does keep its 29 days in February.  So that brings the average closer to the raw number, but doesn’t account for the extra  ones that happen at more ordinary turns of centuries.

Of course, the only turn of a century through which I have lived—and through which I am likely to live**—was indeed the turn of a millennium, so I guess for me, the fraction 3/28 should be fairly accurate.

I could, if I were so inclined, go back to the first year in which I experienced a February—that would be 1970 (AD or CE)—and work through them to find out just how many dual Fridays the 13th I’ve experienced.  With modern computer-based calendars it would even be relatively easy.  But I don’t think I am so inclined.

Okay, that’s enough of that for now.  Actually, it’s probably too much of that, at least from any normal person’s (i.e., not my) perspective.  On to other things.

I’m writing this post on my mini lapcom, and I wrote yesterday’s post on the lapcom as well; I am doing this partly to spare my thumbs, but also to try to encourage myself to use the lapcom more and maybe even to write fiction again.  I don’t know whether or not that will happen, but it’s also just more natural for me to use the lapcom.  I’ve been typing, in one way or another, since I was 11 years old, if memory serves.  Clearly I have not been using a smartphone nearly that long, because they have not existed for that long.

Also, even when I saw the imagined future tech on Start Trek:  The Next Generation of tablets with virtual keyboards, I thought they looked like a terrible idea.  How lame, how unaesthetic, just to tap at a flat screen with no real keys.  Also, the “keys” on such devices in the real world are too effing small to be used to type in any traditional way.  Not but what one can get to be pretty speedy with them—I can zip along pretty well on my smartphone—but it’s nothing compared to being able to use one’s whole set of fingers to write.

Although, I’ve often touted the value of writing things longhand before retyping them into the computer, especially for fiction, because it can slow one down beneficially.  I did that—because I had no choice, being at the time a guest of the Florida DOC—with Mark Red, with The Chasm and the Collision, and with the “short” story Paradox City.  I don’t know whether they come across as better or worse or indistinguishable from the stories I have written directly onto the computer.

I would say that they might tend to be shorter, but Paradox City is a nominally short story that was about 60 hand-written pages long, so that didn’t make things much shorter.  Also, I think The Chasm and the Collision is longer than Son of Man, but that may just be a function of the nature of those stories.

Certainly Unanimity is longer than anything else I’ve written, by quite a margin, but that surprised me as much as it might anyone else.  I just started writing the story and it ended up taking that long to tell it.  That happens.  Outlaw’s Mind began as an idea for a short story, but there was definitely a lot there implicitly, even in the original idea, that made it unreasonable to plan to make it “short”.

Anyway, if any readers of this blog have also read my stories and have noticed any tendency toward difference between the initially handwritten and the entirely computer written (meaning written on a computer, not by a computer, unless one is referring to me as a computer) ones, I’d be pleased to get your feedback.

In other personal news, well…my pain is leveling off a bit, though my leg joints still feel loose and floppy and unstable, so I have to be careful, and I have my general persistent tension and neuropathic discomfort in my lower body.  I’ve tried to adjust (and decrease) my workout a bit to compensate, and that seems to be doing some good, but I cannot go without working out, because that tends to make my pain worse.

My mood is pretty much as it usually is, but I’ll spare you that hellscape out of courtesy.

Tomorrow is Saturday, and I am not supposed to be working this weekend.  If that changes—in other words, if I do work—I guess I’ll write a post.  Though, really, I should try to get back into Outlaw’s Mind and finish what I had started earliest so I could then get on to newer things.  And if wishes were horses, we’d all be drowning in manure***.

Tomorrow is also Valentine’s Day, but this is of no relevance to me, and that holiday hasn’t been relevant to me for more than 15 years, possibly quite a bit more.  It is not likely to be relevant to me again this side of the grave (and even less likely to be relevant on the other side).

I hope you all have a good weekend, even those of you who have loved ones with whom you can revel in the romance of the holiday.  It’s not your fault that you piss me off.

*This means, of course, that there will be some March Fridays the 13th in years where there was no February Friday the 13th.  If my figuring is correct, those will be the leap-year Februarys in which the 13th falls on a Thursday.

**If I were to be alive in 2100, I would be 130 years old, which would make me even with the Old Took, and which would be substantially older than any human is known to have lived.

***And ironically, any wishes for the manure to go away would just make things worse!

by

What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should blog for her?

Hello and good morning.  By no one’s demand, it’s time for another Thursday blog post.  On the other hand, it’s also not as though anyone has demanded that I not write a blog post.  This combination of facts suggests more or less complete, tacit indifference to my posting.

That’s okay, I guess.  And it’s not as though I could just arbitrarily change things on a whim even if it were not okay.  I suppose it might be doable for me to become unpopular, and to have people at least suggesting that I should stop.  I’d just have to start writing truly deplorable things.  Of course, it would be a challenge to be so deplorable as to engender bipartisan hatred.

It sounds somewhat intriguing, I must be honest, but it also sounds like a lot of work.  And I am just increasingly exhausted all the time, mentally.  I’ve used the following analogy before, and I don’t want to run it into the ground, but I feel very much as Gandalf described the Nazgul or any mortal who keeps a great ring of power:  they do not die, but neither do they grow or obtain new life; they merely continue, until at last every breath is a weariness.  Or, as Bilbo described what he was experiencing:  he felt thin and stretched out, like butter that’s been scraped over too much bread.  And as Bilbo concluded about himself, I need a change.

Alas, I have no friends among the high elves, so I can expect no welcome in Rivendell, nor am I friends with dwarves, so Erebor is not available to me.  I don’t seem to be good at maintaining connections with any people who are not nearby (whether they are real or not).  I didn’t quite realize this while I was growing up, because I was the youngest of three kids, and I lived in the same house and so stayed in the same school system until I was 18 (or very nearly).  The people around me were relatively constant for a long time.

As it is, though, I have a difficult time imagining what other people are doing‒even people I know very well‒when they’re not with me, or even that they’re doing anything at all, let alone what they might be thinking.  I think fiction at least helped train me to imagine other people’s thoughts in many ways, and I think that’s invaluable; I think reading* fiction should be encouraged in all autistic children if possible.

But it requires effort to imagine what someone might be thinking or even that they’re thinking or doing anything at all when they’re not with me.  This doesn’t mean I don’t care about them, or about other people; that’s orthogonal to the question.  The people who are important to me are very important.  But I can’t feel them from a distance, so to speak.

This, unfortunately, is why it’s not much use if someone says that there are people out there who care about you, to whom you matter, or words to that effect.  It’s certainly well-intentioned, and it is no doubt sincere.  But however true it is, the emotional valence is low.  I cannot feel that those people, whoever they may be, care about me unless I’m interacting with them, though I may know it to a high degree of intellectual credence.

Maybe this is part of why I find it difficult to believe in ghosts, or any kind of afterlife, or any of the many invisible cosmic imaginary friends that people call gods.  Not that I think that I’m missing out in this case; intellectually as well as emotionally, empathically, I have found no reason to believe in any such things (though I have enjoyed writing fiction about them).

Indeed, the more I look, the less likely they seem.  But I do not give them zero credence, though it may come vanishingly close to zero over time.  But to give something an actual credence of zero, in Bayesian terms at least, means to say that there is no evidence or reasoning that could make you consider the proposition even possibly true.  That sounds terribly irrational to me, I don’t know about you.  It sounds like dogmatism, like blind belief, and I have no desire for such things.  I have very little tolerance for them.

What was I writing about?  Oh, yeah, that feeling of separateness and loneliness, of being almost cosmically, solipsistically alone, even though there are people out there (mostly far away) who care.

I have probably used this analogy before, but it’s a bit like being adrift in a small open boat on the ocean, and you have a radio that can only send in Morse code, but you can receive audio messages that there are ships out there, and they care about you, they feel bad that you are floating out there alone in an open boat, they support you.  And you believe them.  And the moral support is nice as far as it goes, but it doesn’t rescue you from being adrift at sea, with only the resources in your little boat, and you don’t actually know how long those supplies are able to last.  But they are finite.

Oh, who knows?  And why should anyone care?  I don’t know.  I have a hard time making good arguments for caring about me.

TTFN

*Reading is, I think, far superior to taking in TV shows, videos, movies, etc., though those things can be great fun.  With written fiction, one can literally get inside the minds of the characters and be given insight into what and how they are thinking and feeling.  With TV and movies, those feelings can only be inferred at best, and only when the acting is tolerably clear and those emotions are definitive.  For people with difficulty judging other people’s faces at times, that can be less useful than reading.

by

“You’ve been out ridin’ fences for so long now.”

As you can see, I followed through on my threat and did indeed write a post today (Saturday the 3rd of January in 2026) because I am going to the office today.  My new (and old) tinnitus persists, which is annoying, and I’ve still got some minor cold symptoms.  There’s no real coughing or sneezing, though, so I don’t think I’m terribly contagious.  If I am, well, I’ve spent a lot of time tilting at the windmill of getting people to take disease prevention and so on seriously, but things continue to get worse, so to hell with the world, I guess.  But it doesn’t really matter much.

I initially thought that I had only received feedback from one person here‒as I suspected might happen‒in response to my request for feedback on what I should try to restart writing.  That person made a recommendation/expressed his preference for what he thought sounded most interesting for me to work on.  But, alas, that’s only one person, so I couldn’t draw too many conclusions from that feedback.

However, it turns out that on Facebook I also received a comment from someone who probably didn’t see the comments here on my actual blog, so the comment was probably unbiased.  The interesting thing is that both people, in two separate spaces, said they were interested in the same story:  The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.

So, needless to say, I intend to start working again on Outlaw’s Mind.

I’m kidding.  I’m not that perverse.  I feel a bit disappointed that no one could really even consider my other story HELIOS, but no one else but me really knows anything about it.  That story was originally‒way back in the depths of time‒a comic book superhero story that I invented and for which I even drew some comic book style drawings when I was in grade school and maybe into junior high.  But the modern version of the story, though arguably still a kind of superhero, or at least superhuman, story, is much more sophisticated than the inevitably derivative character I had invented as a child.

Anyway, HELIOS is probably my oldest story notion that I’m considering writing again nowadays, even older than Ends of the Maelstrom.  That doesn’t mean it’s my favorite or anything, it just means there’s a wee bit of nostalgia in it.

So, I shall begin rereading and editing and then, hopefully, writing more on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.  This story was conceived as a manga, and so it is not a single-book notion, but is planned as a series of some form or another*.  That might be very good, actually, because it would mean I can publish it in smaller chunks, so to speak.

Unanimity took forever first to write and then to edit, but it was one self-contained story with a beginning, middle, and end (half a million words long overall).  I can make the first volume of DFandD end with the ending of the “heroes’” first quest, which has already begun so far in what I’ve already written.  Maybe that will be good.  I can even put some illustrations in the book (maybe) since I have done some of them**.

Anyway, that is currently my plan, if it merits the term.  I’ll try to work my work on that work into lull times at work***, and make some progress on it.  Then maybe it will take off and become hugely, internationally popular, and I’ll become rich, famous, and powerful.

Stranger things have happened, after all‒and that series has done quite well, I understand, though I lost interest in it not even halfway through the first series.  I think it’s the sort of show that I could only enjoy if I were watching it with someone.  In many cases, watching shows or movies or similar is my only way to connect with other people and with the shows or movies.  I have to have some means to connect; I cannot seem to do it on my own, and I don’t know if I ever have been able to do so.

Anyway, I guess that’s my plan for the moment.  It will always be dependent upon my physical and especially my mental health.  But that goes for everything.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good weekend.  Here, in closing, is a recording of me trying to practice the song, Desperado, which would make a lovely theme to a TV series based on my stories, I think.  I’ve gotten better since I recorded this.

*This was the idea for Mark Red as well, for which I have at least two more books lying fallow.  Unfortunately, no one loves that story apart from me, so it doesn’t look like the other two volumes will be written anytime soon, if at all.  It probably suffers from the fact that it was the first book I published, and so there were rough edges.  Qué lástima.

**As an aside, I wish I still had an illustration of the Vagabond that I did years ago, because I wanted to use that as the cover picture when I published the novel, but alas, it is gone with almost everything else I used to own.

***Yes, that was deliberate.  Sorry if it comes across as awkward, but I tend to like to play with words.

by

Wednesday woes of a weary worrier who wishes he would write more worlds

It’s Wednesday now, and I’m writing this on my mini lapcom for the first time in 12 days.  Well, actually, I’m writing this for the first time, full stop.  I’ve never written this particular blog post before.  But I haven’t written anything at all using the lapcom—the mini one, anyway—since December 5th, twelve days ago.  I know because that was the last time I wrote a blog post on the lapcom, a fact easy to discern since I save all the files with the date as part of the title and list them in order from most recent to oldest in my blog post saves file.

Am I ruining the magic?  I work with this stuff, you know.

Anyway, I’m not going to get into explorations of the nature of days or human interactions and inadequate equilibria like I did yesterday.  At least, I don’t think I’m going to do that.  I wasn’t planning  to do it yesterday, though—it just sort of spewed out when I opened my figurative mouth, as much to my surprise as to yours—so I cannot rule out the possibility entirely.  Still, it would be a strange thing indeed for me to start writing about the same subject(s).  I don’t even remember very clearly what I wrote yesterday.  That’s one of the side-effects of writing it all down:  I don’t need to use my own disk space to store it in my head.

But I don’t feel like writing anything about external reality on any kind of large scale today.  I don’t really feel like writing anything at all; I’m just doing this out of habit, which has tremendous power over me.  Of course, it’s my habit, initiated by me, so in a way I’m saying that I have tremendous power over me.  Unfortunately, that power is not something readily consciously seized.

I had a good habit going when I was writing fiction for a long time there.  Starting when I was up at FSP West I wrote three to four pages of fiction every day, and kept that up for nearly ten years, I think, writing or editing on every work morning but Thursdays, and I produced a lot of material given that time frame.  Here, just take a look on Amazon at my list of author’s works*.  There are many titles there.  Mind you, there is some redundancy, in that my short stories that are available individually only for Kindle are also collected into Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities** along with two stories that don’t appear elsewhere.

I was “triggered” to think about such things yesterday afternoon when my coworker was telling me about watching It: Welcome to Derry, and discussing how other things from the Stephen King universe are involved in it, as well as other characters.  It sounded pretty nifty, though I don’t know that I’ll ever watch it.  What it made me think most, though, was how my fictional universe(s) is/are interconnected in many ways, and that they’re all also connected back to the first full-length novel I ever wrote back in high school, called Ends of the Maelstrom.

I lost the original draft of that when I lost nearly everything else I owned—and things far more important even than all that—back in 2012.  But I know the story, of course, and I could probably rewrite it more or less as it was, if I just chose to do it.

But I bemoaned the fact—as I said to my coworker—that I don’t seem able to write fiction anymore, even though thinking about that combined universe writing makes me think about my many unwritten stories.  As I said to my coworker, I really wish I could finish Outlaw’s Mind, though it will end quite sadly, and is already very sad.  I gave him some minor spoilers, which I felt were fine, since he’s unlikely to read any of it, ever.

Of course, not too long ago I wrote my little sci-fi story Extra Body, which is really meant to be kind of funny, in a way, but I couldn’t even get to the point of editing that very much, let alone publishing it.  And I haven’t made any further progress on DFandD.

I wish I had the energy to write new fiction, but all my energy reserves seem to be used up, or at least I am trying to get the dregs out of the container every day.  But every day it gets harder just to make it to the next day.  I’m exhausted, I’m always in pain, I have no real rest and nothing to which I look forward.  If I had a simple “off” switch, I might just flip it.

The trouble with that, of course, is that if it literally just stopped me, it might be possible for someone else to flip it back on and I would have to resume just as I had been when I flipped it off (so to speak).  It might be better to go into a cocoon like Adam Warlock and metamorphose into the next stage of my existence, but I don’t appear to have that option.

I’m very tired.  So very tired.  Indeed, I’m so tired that I’m writing sentence fragments.

Maybe I’ll try to share my various works on social media, to see if anyone picks up on any of them.  I doubt they will, but it’s possible.  After that, I don’t know.  It’s nearly the end of another pointless year, albeit one with one saving grace, perhaps two.  I don’t really look forward to seeing the next year.

But I probably will see myself to writing tomorrow’s blog post.  In the meantime, I hope you’re all doing okay.

*There’s some book in there by someone else that has a sort of similar title to one of my books (Son of Man), but the author’s name is nothing like mine, so I don’t know what the heck is up with Amazon’s software that it put that there.  It’s sort of annoying, but it’s not worth the effort to try to get them to fix it.  They didn’t even carry any Hanukkah-themed gift card boxes or envelopes this year, which really makes me feel a bit disinclined to buy from them as much as I have in the past.

**That one is available in hardcover, and it ought to arrive before Christmas for most people if you wanted to order it as a gift for someone.

by

Another day, same old stories

Well, it’s Tuesday the 2nd (of December) and that two/Tue coincidence has to be worth something doesn’t it?  I suppose it would be better if this were February (the 2nd month), but perhaps it’s enough to note that the difference between the official number of this month (12) and its nominative number (10) is 2.  Anyway, having two twos might make more “sense” than having three of them.

Is that important?  Almost certainly not.  In 56 years of time and space, I’ve never encountered anything that was truly and objectively “important”.  But it is the sort of thing that engages my (admittedly rather odd) aesthetic sense, and this is my blog*, so I will indulge myself.

Anyway, it’s the second day of the work week, and I’m going to work.  The reason I go to work is, at root, nominally to keep myself alive and “thriving”, so I can…what?  Keep working?  I don’t have any other, deeper or longer-term reasons.  It’s fairly absurd when you think about it.  It’s a self-referential, almost tautological, ouroboros-like situation.

By the way, I don’t see any reason to think that this state of affairs is the product of some conspiracy‒centuries or even millennia long as it would have to be‒by the powerful to keep the masses toiling away for their benefit.  For one thing, as we can all plainly see (I hope) the powerful are at least as idiotic and moronic and clueless as anyone else, and they probably tend to be less self-critical, so they are more prone to do really stupid things without anyone protecting them from their own stupidity.

They no more really, actually control anything‒including themselves‒than a queen bee (or ant or termite) runs its hive/hill/colony.  The queen just happens to be the breeding female.  And even that is not a role based on any merit, other than being capable of developing active ovaries.  The queens are “chosen” randomly, as far as we can tell.

It’s all just shit that happens in a region of spacetime in which entropy is moving from low to high, as it tends to do, but in which there’s enough movement involved in the process to allow for locally highly complex phenomena based on carbon’s extraordinarily fecund chemistry, which occasionally forms self-replicating molecules that undergo natural selection.

But people tell stories about things.  It’s one of our strongest attributes, and it serves in us roughly the same “purpose” as the various pheromone trails and hive dances in the aforementioned ants and bees and termites.  Our stories allow us to act in concert with many other people, on a scale that puts even the social insects to shame.

We often believe that our stories are true, at least to some degree.  And some of them, in a limited sense, really are “true”.  But most of them are just stories, made up “just so” explanations of things we either haven’t figured out or that have a nature too complicated or too daunting for us to want to face them as they are.

As someone who has a penchant for creating stories, I can tell you, it’s quite easy to make up plausible-seeming, internally consistent tales about worlds and characters and events, real or otherwise, that have little to do with reality other than that it is a fact of reality that I made up those stories.

I consider all religions and all their related tales to be part of this phenomenon.  This is not an insult to them per se, and the tendency for people to take it as an insult or an attack belies the faith such people claim to have in their religions.  But people who really think a particular thing is true don’t have to defend it with anger, let alone violence.

Imagine if the classical physics people had crucified Planck for solving the “ultraviolet catastrophe” by positing that only certain chunks (quanta) of energy can be produced, or if they had burned Einstein at the stake for not only showing that light comes in such quanta but that matter is also finely divided***.

Science does also work with stories.  Every hypothesis is a story, and some of them can seem extremely compelling.  Some of them we really want to think are true.  And that’s why, ideally, science takes every such story and pokes the hell out of it, trying to show if and where it’s wrong, where it’s internally inconsistent, where it doesn’t match what actually seems to happen in the world.  It’s not perfect, but it does improve in an incremental, ratchet-like fashion, at least as long as we hold to the rigorous, ruthless, but honest criticism of those stories.

With that, I’ll draw the main body of this post to a close.  I have no idea why I’ve written what I’ve written, or at least I don’t know very well.  I doubt there’s any internal consistency or coherence to it, but I guess that supports my point.

Please try to have a good day.

[Aside: a thought occurred to me yesterday that, as we approach the era of humane, lab-grown meat derived from animal stem cells, what, if any, would be the moral implications of using human stem cells, taken from a volunteer‒I’m willing‒to grow meat in the lab and have people eat it?  There’s no risk of parasites or infections, assuming reasonable genetic screening, such as might explain an evolved revulsion for cannibalism.  There’s no one being harmed.  What do you think?  I’m not concerned with whether you feel it’s somehow “icky”; that’s just misfiring evolution-based taboos.  Do you think there is any moral reason not to grow and eat such meat?  If so, what are they?]

*There are many others like it**, but this one is mine.

**Are they really like it, though?  You tell me.

***These are two of the things Einstein demonstrated during his annus mirabilis (i.e., “miraculous ass”***) in 1905, the same year he published his paper introducing special relativity.

***That’s not really what it means.

by

For they blog between term and term, and then they perceive not how time moves

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, so of course I’m writing my “traditional” blog post, with my “traditional” salutation and ending.  I haven’t written the ending yet, but I will, and of course, when you’re reading this, I will have already written those four closing letters—like a vortex manipulator, it’s a kind of cheap and nasty time travel.

I’m writing this post on my mini lapcom, the device formerly known as a laptop computer (to me, at least), because I thought it would be good to write my traditional Thursday post on my traditional type of device.  It’s all very exciting, obviously.

Except of course that it is not exciting.  Nothing is exciting.  There are many worrisome and alarming and infuriating and disgusting things happening in the world and in my pseudo-life, but they are not exciting.

I can’t even feel one of my turns coming on.  Rather, I think I’ve been in “one of my turns” in a low-key way for quite some time now.

I’m very tired.

I wish getting out the lapcom got me fired up to write some new fiction.  I certainly have plenty of story ideas and plots and whatnots in the back of my mind.  But I have no energy to act on them.  By the end of any given workday, I can barely drag myself onto the train to go back to the house, to be honest.

Then, of course, there’s the current washing machine problem.  The machine has finally been delivered, but the old, broken machine is still in place, so the new one hasn’t been installed, and I’m not sure when it will be.  I’m eating into my savings, such as they are, buying new clothes in the meantime.

The need to buy new clothes is particularly irritating, because—quite apart from the expense—I had no desire to buy any, possibly ever again.  New clothes are for people who have a future toward which they look with at least some degree of positive anticipation.  I do not see my own future with any good feelings.

Speaking of the future and not having one and also writing fiction, I thought of an amusing, cautionary tale, a fable of sorts, recently.  Imagine a young man—this sort of story really only works with such a protagonist—who finds a literal genie in a lamp and is given the traditional three wishes.

For his first wish, this young man asks for the ability to stop other people (and things) in time, imagining/planning various nefarious deeds he might undertake while people are “frozen”.  The genie is puzzled and seems troubled, but he grants this first wish.  Soon, the young man finds himself in a situation where he wants to test the power, but when he turns it on a chosen target, as soon as he does, the person just…vanishes.

The young man summons the genie, saying the power didn’t work, panicking a bit about what happened.  The genie explains that the person for whom he stopped time vanished because they simply did not continue past the point in time at which they had been frozen.  So, they did not exist in any future time, and they never would.

The genie had wondered why the young man wanted that power, but he had granted it.  Unfortunately, this deed cannot be readily undone; they cannot bring the person out of the past using the young man’s power as it is.  To change that power and to bring the person back would require the use of the two remaining wishes.

Will the young man choose to do it?  Will he correct his error?  Or will he continue to have the power, now using it as a weapon rather than the for the lascivious means for which he had imagined using it?

I admit, it would be kind of interesting to have such a power.  It’s reminiscent of the ability to send people “away” that the main character had in Stranger in a Strange Land.

What would you do with such an ability?  I would probably use it in morally questionable ways, myself.  But there certainly are people about whom it can safely be said that the world would, overall, be better off if they stopped moving forward through time.

Incidentally, this process would not run afoul of the principle of conservation of energy.  That conservation principle, like all physical conservation principles, is dependent upon the symmetry of the system—this was demonstrated by the genius Emmy Noether in her famous theorem.

The conservation of energy is (or, rather, it would be) a consequence* of the time symmetry of the universe.  But the universe is not symmetric in time, not on large enough scales.  So, on large enough scales, energy (and thus also mass) is not conserved.  Locally it tends to be, because locally, time is symmetrical to a good approximation, rather as the local surface of the Earth is approximately flat on a small enough scale…or rather like the way a small enough portion of any continuous curve can be arbitrarily closely matched by a straight segment on a small enough scale.  This latter fact is the source of the power of calculus.

But just as one can have a local hill or curved shape on the surface of the Earth, one could—in principle—violate local conservation of energy given the right available manipulations.  Now, we in the real world cannot do such a thing, at least not right now, but presumably it would not be beyond the power of a genie.

Okay, well, that’s all pretty stupid, I know, but what do you expect?  It’s me, after all.

I hope you or y’all have as good a day as you possibly can, which you will have, since there is no other possibility.  That doesn’t mean it will be a good day.  It will merely be the best possible day you can have, even if it’s horrible.  Still, I do hope that for you, at least, it will be good.

TTFN

*An interesting term to use, given the current subject.  It has a relation to the order of things in time:  con (with) sequence (ordering of things).