May 14, 2020 by Robert Elessar

Time and the hour blog through the roughest day

Hello and good morning. Welcome to another Thursday, a reminder that you’ve survived for yet another week. Congratulations! You’ve earned the chance to read yet another edition of my weekly blog.

I’ve been thinking about the recurrent and ongoing desire I have to reinvigorate Iterations of Zero, my “other” blog, in which I range over a wider…well, range of topics, many of them darker than what I address here. I tend to keep this blog, the one you’re reading, focused on my creative writing (books and short stories) and on music when that comes up (though that also appears on IoZ).

One of the biggest obstacles to IoZ is that I imagine that I should write about planned and specific topics there. When I write this weekly blog, I don’t plan it in advance. I just write whatever comes out, rather in the way that people have conversations*, and it seems to work nicely. So, what I intend to try is not to plan what I’m going to write in Iterations of Zero, but simply start writing as I do here, and see what comes out. Hopefully, I won’t start channeling ancient Lemurians or some similar such nonsense. I can think of it almost as a kind of free-association psychotherapy…except that I can’t really do it while lying on a leather “couch”.

This won’t clear away every barrier to posting in IoZ. One of its other main obstacles is time. I don’t want to sacrifice another weekday morning that could be spent working on my books, since I already miss one of the those a week doing what you’re reading now. And, despite my exhortations for all of you to send me lots of money so I can become independently wealthy and write full-time, I still have to work for a living, and to commute (yes, I’m back in the office full-time now), so my free time is woefully limited.

I’ve tried various means to get around that problem, including buying a Bluetooth keyboard for my cell phone so I can write blog posts there. It’s a nifty little gizmo, and it does its job nicely, but it hasn’t seemed to make me any more likely to use my spare moments to write. I’m much more prone to use them to read blog posts and to check various news and science sites. I guess I’m going to have to bite the bullet and just tell myself to write something—anything—every Sunday, which is the one day I never use to work on my books**. We’ll see how it works out, but it can be soooo hard to kick myself into gear on Sundays.

Now, to abruptly shift gears and address another potential time sink: I’ve been considering restarting audio recordings of some of my work. I have a few published short stories for which I haven’t recorded audio (and thus haven’t posted to YouTube), and of course I only reached Chapter 9 of The Chasm and the Collision before deciding that not enough people were following it to make it worthwhile***.

However, there is real, personal, ego-syntonic joy in reading my stories aloud and posting them for people to listen if they want. Doing so in the past also helped me learn how to use Audacity, which led to me being able to record and produce my original songs, which is double-plus-good. So, what I think I may do is put out a few posts here with links/embedding of my short stories’ audio “videos” (one post) and chapters of CatC (another post) to give you all an easy place to link to them, to see if I get any new listens, and to elicit any comments in favor of or against me doing further recordings.

It might also be nice to do a post embedding my song “videos” as well, since I have little bits and pieces of the beginnings of various others bouncing about on paper and in my head and might be pushed toward or away from further efforts by reader/listener response. But that’s mainly orthogonal to the preceding point.

As for much more important matters, Unanimity continues to draw nearer to its final form. I’m within a few hundred pages of the end of the penultimate edit! That might not sound like much, but in a half-a-million-word novel, believe me, it’s getting close to the end. Of course, the final run-through will be the hardest work since the original writing of the book, but the excitement of being near completion should easily keep me going. Hopefully, I’ll be able to spread a little of that excitement to all of you. There are worse contagions to catch, as we all know.

With that, I’ll call this week’s blog installment good and move on to other things. I hope you’re all well, and that you stay well and become even better over time for as long as you are able.

TTFN

*Some of you may say that this fact is obvious based on the quality of this weekly blog. You really know how to hurt a guy.

**There’s nothing religious about this; Sunday is just the one day of every week that I never go to official work. For that reason, it’s also the day I do my laundry, and I can guarantee that there is nothing religious about that process.

***I honestly don’t understand this. I know I’m biased, but I really love that story—and others have told me they love it also and have thanked me for writing it—and I think that I narrate it well. Oh, well.

February 28, 2020 by Robert Elessar

Some Thing or Other There Is That Doesn’t Like A Covered Wall

This isn’t MINE, obviously, but it IS me performing. Though the drums are electronic, since I don’t have a set to use.

I’d love to know what you think.

October 10, 2019 by Robert Elessar

The man that hath no music in himself…is fit for treasons, stratagems and blogs

$galileo math$

some of Galileo’s figuring

Good morning, all. It’s Thursday, so—as per usual—it’s time for another weekly blog post. Here we go!

I’ve had a mildly underproductive editing week, because last Friday, Saturday, and then this Monday, I got wrapped up in completing my latest song, Come Back Again. If you’re interested, you can listen to it on YouTube, here on my website, or on my Facebook page. It’s also posted in audio-only format on Iterations of Zero. If anyone wants, I could send you an mp3 copy; that seems vanishingly unlikely, though. The only people who seem to listen to my songs are immediate family members and similarly unfortunate, obligated people. I do think the song is surprisingly decent, considering I did it using only two electric guitars (not at the same time), two smartphone rhythm apps (sampled and altered in various ways), a very cheap desktop keyboard, an actual desktop with smartphone for some of the percussion, and the amazing free audio editing software Audacity. Oh, and of course, a microphone and voice recording program for the singing. I suppose you could add pens and paper for writing the words and music. All in all, not much was needed.

It’s curious that, in order to publish my songs effectively, I need to make “videos” of them, even though the visuals only consist of the icon from my Iterations of Zero website. I don’t even use the icon from this site, because that’s just my face, and I can’t imagine anyone wanting to look at my face long enough to listen to a song.

It’s interesting, though, that one can readily upload videos to Facebook (and Twitter, I think), but they don’t easily let you share simple audio files. As a stereotypical standup comedian might say, “What’s that all about?” It’s a little odd that everyone wants to upload videos and pictures ad infinitum to sites like Facebook and Instagram—as they presume, without any discernable justification, that other people want to look at them—but not audio. Yet the latter can be appreciated even while commuting, even while driving, as the wonder of audiobooks and podcasts (and radio) demonstrates.

Perhaps I’m just a curmudgeon*, but I feel that most videos shared by ordinary people, and often even by professionals, are just talking faces with nonspecific backgrounds relating matters that could be communicated purely by voice (or—God forbid—the written word!).

Anyway, my song is out there. As I’ve said before, making and releasing these songs really is a vanity project for me, not just in the egotistical sense of the word, but also in the sense of it being in vain…pointless. The latter sense of the term applies to me far more often than does the former. Though I have a reasonably good opinion of my ability to perform tasks of various kinds, and to master subjects with a fair amount of depth, I am not vain in the narcissistic sense about much. I have no illusions about the importance of anything I do or make or its value to anyone else. Mostly, I’m just a proverbial Voice Crying Out in the Wilderness ™**. Or, to be a little less pretentious, I’m a case of “I am, I said,” with not even furniture taking note of the declaration.

Nevertheless, since Tuesday I have returned to my usual schedule of working on Unanimity. I’ve encountered an interesting place where the way I wrote the book has shifted character times slightly…meaning I had to go back in time from events of an immediately preceding section to catch up with what was happening to other characters. This is common, of course, since we can’t skip back and forth sentence by sentence to see that one character is doing in “real time” while something is happening to another.

But I think I’m going to have to adjust it. I think the story will flow better if I take the section in question and transplant it to just before the immediately preceding section. This is a minor enough change, and I think most authors probably do it often, but it’s interesting to me because I don’t think I’ve ever needed to do it before. Usually when I write something, it comes out pretty much as the story is “meant” to flow. Unfortunately, Unanimity is just such a long novel, with so much going on, often to characters in separate locations, that it wasn’t all going to come out quite in optimal order on the first draft. Not to say it wouldn’t be tolerable in its current form—it would be—but it wouldn’t be ideal, from my point of view.

That’s all probably not interesting to anyone else but me.

Meanwhile, speaking of audio (I was, you can go back and check), I’m “currently” listening to a wonderful book called Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe. I highly recommend it. Seriously. Even if you’re not a math type person (though I have to admit that I am one, a bit), I think it will give you easy-to-understand but clear and real insights into not just why calculus—and mathematics in general—is so useful to nearly everything of substance in science and technology*** but also why it’s so breathtakingly beautiful that some people are utterly captivated by it and pursue it hour after hour, year after year, even in their spare time.

Galileo famously said that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. And someone else said (I can’t find the credit for the quote), “Physicists defer only to mathematicians, and mathematicians defer only to God.” We can imagine universes where the charge and mass of an electron are different than they are here, or where coupling constants and the cosmological constant and the ratio of the strength of the gravitational to the electromagnetic force are different—and we can readily imagine life forms whose genetic data isn’t encoded in DNA…but it’s impossible to conceive of a logically consistent universe in which the square root of two is the ratio of two integers, or in which there is a largest prime number.

Maybe God defers to mathematicians. Or maybe He just is one.

And with that bit of casual blasphemy, I think I’ve done enough damage for this week. I hope you’re all well, and that you’re enjoying listening to, reading, watching, and doing whatever it is that—when integrated under the curve of your lifespan—makes your existence as joyful and fulfilling as possible.

TTFN

*There’s no “perhaps” about me being a curmudgeon; the “perhaps” refers to whether I’m merely a curmudgeon, or if there’s more to me than that. The jury is still out.

**Actually, I’m quite sure that’s not from the book of Proverbs; I think it’s from Isaiah or Ezekiel. Let me check…
…yes, it’s from Isaiah.

***Which, in the modern world, means pretty much everything, full stop.

October 7, 2019 by Robert Elessar

Come Back Again (a new song)

Words and Music by Robert Elessar

Performed by Robert Elessar

Produced by Robert Elessar

Sky blue
Sky gray
Dark and stormy night
Sunny day
Only meeting strangers
Always losing friends
Every new beginning
Always ends.

And if your travels bring you to a place
Where you’re afraid to show your face
remember
All you’ll be is all you’ve been,
So turn around, come back again.

Walking down the street
I saw a car go by with no one driving
I watched it pass and wondered what the hell was going on.
There’s something not quite right, I thought
and hopped a bus that was just arriving
I got it and I sat down fine, but suddenly
I was gone.

Sky blue
Sky black
Creeping slowly forward
Falling back
Nothing ever stops
But nothing really goes
Is there any reason?
No one knows.

But I’d stay by you until the end
In times of darkness I’m your friend
So maybe
If you need
A helping hand
Just turn around
Come back again.

Come back again.

September 1, 2019 by Robert Elessar

Breaking Me Down (rebuilt)

Words and Music by Robert Elessar

Produced and performed by Robert Elessar

I sit alone at home sometimes and want to go berserk
But doing that just never seems to work
The shelves are stacked with books but I don’t feel that I could read
While all around a thousand phantoms lurk

I drink a little wine; I eat a little meat
I wonder why I’m shivering in such infernal heat
I feel a little tired; my head’s a little light
I wish that I could close my eyes and block my inner sight.

If you could see me now, you’d probably wonder where I’ve been
But I stand and I fall
And I listen for your call
While hiding out inside the dragon’s den.

I wander ‘round through my internal night
I travel back and forth throughout the town
But if you ask, I’ll tell you I’m all right
My nervousness is just breaking me down.

I listen to the sounds of everybody having fun
I can’t join in ‘cause I don’t have a gun,
They’re scattering their ashes all along the motorway
Then scampering like rabbits on the run

I bounce off all the walls; I turn out all the lights
I always want to hit someone, but I never get in fights
I feel a bit confused; my thoughts are incomplete
There’s tingling in my fingers and there’s swelling in my feet

If you could hear what I hear you would deafen both your ears
But I can’t, and I know
That no matter where I go
I’m followed by the grinding of my gears.

I stare around in paranoiac fright
While grinning at my heartbreak like a clown
So don’t come in, and don’t turn on the light
It’s just my past mistakes breaking me down

I look at all the colors of the pictures in my mind
They’re all so dark, I might as well be blind
The path laid out ahead of me is so filled up with smoke
I think that I’d prefer to just rewind

I roam around the house; I drive around the town
I don’t know if I’m back and forth or if I’m up and down
I dive into the sea; I look into the sky
I try to understand them, but we can’t see eye to eye

If you could see inside my head, your own head would explode
But I nod, and I grin
At the end where I begin
And I smile, and I wave
When I pass an open grave
And I slump, and I sigh
When we have to say goodbye
I’ll see you at the ending of the road

I wander through the wasteland struck with blight
I make my Hell to wear an earthly crown
I smash all mirrors, I can’t stand the sight
Of everything that is breaking me down.

August 15, 2019 by Robert Elessar

For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech, to stir men’s blog

Desert desperado

Hello and good morning! It’s another Thursday, and therefore time for another blog entry. In fact, this morning, when activating my computer (which had self-restarted due to one of the seemingly endless “updates” from Windows…which don’t appear to engender any improvement of function whatsoever) I began, by force of habit, to seek out the last point at which I had been editing Unanimity. Then I caught myself and remembered, “Wait, it’s blog day.” Those were, as well as I can recall, my actual internal words. Maybe I should re-christen this day of the week. Who knows, if my writing eventually comes to influence the wide world enough, we English speakers might cast aside the traditional Norse name, which gives homage to a character now most widely remembered as being played by Chris Hemsworth.*

If I had a hammer…

It’s been a fairly drab and inauspicious week for me. There’s not much going on that wasn’t doing so already. I certainly haven’t been keeping up with current events or anything else floating around regular, virtual, or social media. I occasionally go on the Google News “App”, just to skim through the headlines, but I don’t think I’ve so much as clicked on a single story in well over a week. I haven’t even been listening to podcasts, or to Audible books, or even to music during my commute. I just can’t seem to stir any interest in anything, even in books and shows and movies that used to enthrall me. All this, despite months of ongoing treatment for my dysthymia/depression.

Oh, well, whataya gonna do? The universe does not bargain, it cuts no special deals, and it makes only one promise to us all.

I have of course, as might be obvious from my comments above, been working steadily on Unanimity. I’m approaching the end of the book for the second time (really the third, if you count when I wrote it). Much, much works remains to be done, of course, but I’m still enjoying the story. Thus, at least one person in the world will do so, and I suppose that’s a good enough reason to have written it.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I have a difficult time self-promoting, and I’m at least mildly embarrassed bordering on ashamed when I force myself to do it. At times in the past I’ve rued this character trait of mine, and I’ve wished I could be much more of a sounding brass, but the advents of Kanye West and Donald Trump have reassured me that grandiosity is vastly overrated.** There’s probably a happy medium somewhere (who runs a successful fortune-telling shop, one presumes), but if there is, I haven’t located it.

I’ve encountered a few germs of ideas for new stories this week—probably short stories—and jotted them down in my memo app, as I do. That’s always pleasing in at least a small way. There are many, many such little phrases, sentences, and paragraphs in the that file, but it’s difficult to predict how many of them will eventually become full-fledged stories.

I’ve also been diddling away at musical projects. As I think I’ve said before, I’ve been working on a rebuild of Breaking Me Down, my personal best musical, or at least lyrical, expression of depression (sounds like a blast, right?). I’ve learned a thing or two since I first threw it together, and I think it’s definitely improving. I’ve also been working on a new song, which will be slower and will probably sound moodier than Breaking Me Down, but its words are much more…well, not entirely positive, but at least ambiguous, and its ending is, if not truly uplifting, at least hopeful…I think.

It’s a tough situation where you’re not even clear about the meaning of your own poetry. Oh, well.

And that’s pretty much all I have to report for the moment. Apologies if it’s not very gripping, but most days, and most weeks, are ordinary, after all. I hope you’re all well, and that your futures are very bright indeed…but not so bright as to be blinding.

TTFN

*Not to say he doesn’t do a terrific job. It’s not easy to make Thor—the comic book character—cool, but he succeeds in spades.

**Especially by the grandiose.

July 27, 2019 by Robert Elessar

Catechism

A Song

Words and Music by Robert Elessar

Produced and performed by Robert Elessar

The day is coming, can you hear it?
Night is falling, do you fear it?
The ship has sailed, now can you steer it?
Do you know what’s going on?

The moment’s passing, do you know it?
What’s your secret, will you show it?
When your chance comes, will you blow it?
Can you be relied upon?

If you can answer all these questions right,
You just might make it through that falling night.
But if these words just serve to turn your head,
The coming dark will bury you with dread.

The world is turning, can you feel it?
The wound is bleeding, can you heal it?
The truth is cloaked, can you reveal it?
I might come along with you.

The picture’s hidden, can you find it?
The tape is jammed, will you rewind it?
I must intrude now, do you mind it?
It’s just that I belong with you.

The world is not so hopeless, is it now?
Is that a statement that you might allow?
Just wipe the tears out of your eyes, won’t you?
To fight the truth, there’s nothing you can do.

The game is set, now can you play it?
The beast is charging, can you slay it?
If all your strength cannot delay it,
Then run away, just run and hide!

The path is clear, but will you hike it?
The cheek is turned, now will you strike it?
The song is over, did you like it?
Forget you heard it, it’s only lied

July 25, 2019 by Robert Elessar

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

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

Okay, so…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TTFN

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

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

July 18, 2019 by Robert Elessar

The art of our necessities is strange that can make vile blogs precious.

Resized_20190620_162430

Generic salutations, and welcome once again to another Thursday. I’m not sure what to write today, having no specific agenda such as I had in the past two weeks. I guess I’ll just start writing—indeed, I’ve already started—and I’ll see what comes out.

First, an update: I’ve been working steadily on the editing of Unanimity, and I’m pleased still to find it engaging and fun. I worried, when writing it, that it wasn’t going to be as good as the other books I’ve written, if only because it’s so long. If brevity is the soul of wit (an unproven assertion), then its lower quality would seem to be implied. However, I think it’s turned out better in some ways, or at the very least as good, as my other works so far. It’s certainly my most “real-world” novel so far. Though Mark Red does take place in what is nominally our own world, it quickly becomes clear that it’s a world in which vampires and other forms of “magic” exist behind the scenes. Son of Man nominally takes place in the “real world,” and is science fiction rather than fantasy, but its setting, being in the future, is quite different from that of our modern lives.

Unanimity, on the other hand, is set in what is more or less clearly the modern world, and though the main action of the story revolves around something inexplicable that could certainly be called “supernatural,” this occurs as a singular outlier in what is otherwise a completely normal, real, human world.* I won’t say that the setting is “typical” of most people’s ordinary lives; it takes place on the campus of a prestigious, research-oriented university, which is not where everyday life occurs for most of us—even those of us who have attended university. But the people in the story are normal, ordinary people, with no experience of or belief in anything overtly supernatural. There are no ray guns or vampires, no time travel let alone travel between parallel universes (as in The Chasm and the Collision).

It’s interesting to think, as I just now did, that almost none of my stories take place in “the real world.” Of course, they tend to happen in universes that look and feel at first glance very much like ours, but there are fundamental departures, often forming the trigger points of the stories. Even I for one welcome our new computer overlords, set in what should be our real world, contains elements of speculative science fiction.** Weirdly and disturbingly enough, my most fundamentally realistic story is Solitaire, and it is also my darkest and most horrifying story (in my opinion, anyway).

I’m not sure what that says about my take on reality.

I took last Friday off editing Free Range Meat, another story where the supernatural intrudes upon what should be ordinary life, because I’ve been working on a new song. Those of you who follow my other blog, Iterations of Zero, may know that I’ve been intermittently distracted by such things since I started to play guitar somewhat more seriously and had also learned that I could use readily available audio mixing and editing software to produce songs all by my lonesome, sometimes recording my versions of other people’s songs, but on two occasions so far producing original works. I can’t make any claims as to the quality or the listenability of the songs, but I had (obsessive) fun doing them, and the same thing is happening again.

Like my second song, Breaking Me Down, this new song (called Catechism), is one for which I wrote the tune and most of the words way back when I was in college. It’s an involuntary fact of my brain’s function that such things don’t tend to go away but continue to rattle and bounce around my head for decades. I didn’t have to find any old papers with the words scribbled down (and the tunes were never previously recorded anywhere but in my mind), I simply had to transcribe them…though I changed a few of the lyrics of both songs, since their earlier versions included some rather embarrassing choices. Of course, anyone listening to the songs as they are now may be justified in exclaiming, “These are the words he left in? What the heck did he take out?”

Writing and producing these songs is a sort of catharsis, a way to get them out of my head and into the world. Of course, that doesn’t actually work, since the brain is not some kind of hydraulic system where pressure can be released and drained. Still, at least now the songs rattling about up there are—or will be—reflections of shapes in the external world, rather than merely virtual music played for an audience of one. I can’t make any guarantees about the quality of the songs—music is if anything even more difficult to judge objectively than fiction is—but I kind of like them. They also give me at least two or three pieces I know that I can play on the guitar better than anybody else can, since I’m the one who wrote them. I am in all other respects a very amateur guitar player.

Once I finish Catechism, I think I’ll publish it here as well as on IoZ, and of course I’ll make “videos” of the songs and put them on my YouTube channel. At the very least, I know that there will be no copyright claims against the videos ever in the future, since the songs are written, performed, and produced entirely by me, rather like my books. It’s a freeing thought.

Wow, for someone who didn’t have much to say, I’ve said a lot today, haven’t I? I think it’s probably more than enough. I’ll just close with a sentiment of encouragement, which I hope doesn’t come across as condescending: If you have any songs or stories (or paintings, or sculptures, or whatever) bouncing around in your head, I hope you’ll try to get them out and make them actual rather than virtual. Somewhere out there, there’s someone who might want to experience them. Even if you’re the only one who ever does, it can be worth it. I think so, anyway.

TTFN

*Though I do throw in a passing reference to the setting of my short story Hole for a Heart, which is certainly a supernatural horror story.

**These may not in fact be what they seem…and if they are not, then Ifowonco would be almost a fully realistic story.

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