optimism

by

The desire is boundless and the blog a slave to limit.

Hello and good morning! It’s Thursday again, which means that, for those of you whose level of masochism far exceeds any possible good sense, it’s time to read another of my weekly blog posts.  Hallelujah!

I’ll try to resist saying much about what’s happening in the world or, more particularly, here in South Florida, but of course, the news is even worse than usual…which is saying quite a lot.  I’d like to be optimistic and speculate that, while things are pretty bad now, regression to the mean suggests that they’ll tend to be at least a bit better over coming weeks and months.

However, optimism isn’t my strong suit, and it’s all too possible that events prior to more recent times have been the atypically good ones and that what we’re experiencing now—which feels like a dip or a downturn—is the actual regression to the mean.  Not that I want to make you feel bad or anything; I’d actually be quite pleased if everyone was upbeat, conscientious, productive, happy, and (quietly) energetic.  I just tend to approach life with an implicit view that, if you’re expecting the worst, the only surprises you’ll get will be good ones.

Maybe I am optimistic after all!

Anyway, in my little corner of reality, things are proceeding more or less as planned.  Unanimity continues to approach its completion.  I’m currently working on the final editing of Part 4 (of 4 parts) of the story, and we’re working on the cover design and the layout and so forth.  It really shouldn’t be much longer.  I doubt that it’ll be ready by the end of July, but August is looking pretty good.

After that, I can go back to a couple of other things I’m working on.  First, I have a new song that I’ve been very gradually developing (I haven’t wanted to let it interfere with Unanimity) that I should be able to put together completely and record and produce and mix and all that stuff.  Then I need to decide whether to release more singles or just to gather everything I have together into an album…though even with this new song it would only have six songs, which feels lame to me*.  If any of you have any preferences, I’d love to hear from you, but I recognize that it’s unlikely that anyone much cares one way or the other.

After that—or more likely contemporaneously—I’m going to go back and finish a novella that I started in the middle of writing Unanimity, as I had done for a few of my recent short stories.  I’m still looking for a title for the story, since I don’t think the working title is good enough, but that’s fine.  I’m sure I’ll come up with something satisfactory; I’m pretty good with titles.

Then, rather than release that novella separately, I’m going to put it together with all my short stories that are currently available only in Kindle format and publish them as Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities***.  There shouldn’t be nearly as long a wait for that as there has been for Unanimity.  It might very well be out before the end of the year, though probably not in time for Halloween, alas.  Anyway, it’ll be in both Kindle and paperback form, so for those of you who prefer a “real” book to read—a preference with which I deeply sympathize—it will have that advantage.

That’s pretty much all that’s happening with me.  Seriously.  I’m extremely boring, even though I live in “interesting times”.  I think I’ve said it before, but this blog is literally the most social thing I do.  I think you’ll find, when you read the novel, that at least one or two of the characters in Unanimity channel that aspect of me, though of course, the horror of the story is something that’s almost the opposite—and yet, it’s also the same.  I’m not sure how even I interpret the message of the tale, if there is one, and I’m the one who wrote it.  I guess in a very long book, which it is, there can be many explorations of potentially contradictory or at least conflicting notions.  I don’t know if that’s interesting or boring.  Perhaps—and this would be weirdly delicious—it’s both.  I guess you’ll have to read it and find out for yourself.

TTFN

*Even though a few of the songs are longish, with those six, I think it’s likely to be only about a half hour in full duration.  The Dark Side of the Moon is just shy of 43 minutes, Abbey Road is 47 minutes, Synchronicity is 39 or 44 minutes depending on which version you’re playing, and Sergeant Pepper is roughly 40 minutes.  Animals is 41 minutes long, and it only has 5 songs!  Four, if you take the 2 parts of Pigs on the Wing as one, which I like to do**.  Perhaps I’m setting high standards of comparison, but why do otherwise?  If I’m going to meet those standards, though, I’m going to need to record a good two more songs beyond the one I’m already talking about.  I have the roots of such songs available, but…it’s a lot of work writing, recording, producing, and mixing songs all by yourself in your spare time, without any expensive equipment.

**If you’ve never heard this album, please go listen to it.  It’s amazing.

***See what I mean about me and titles?

by

Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden, that grows to seed; blogs rank and gross in nature possess it merely.

ulysses

Hello, good morning, and welcome to another Thursday edition of my weekly blog post.  I didn’t sleep well last night—even by my standards—so if I say something even more bizarre or incoherent than usual, I can only apologize and beg you to bear with me.

It’s been a moderately interesting week.  I can honestly say I think I’m finally starting to see some effects of my new depression treatment regimen (not “regime”).  This can’t mean as much to all of you as it does to me, but nonetheless it’s probably a welcome thought for those committed to following this blog.  At least it means—if I’m correct in my assessment—that I’ll be less likely to write quite such dreary things as sometimes drip from my computer when I’m wallowing in the dumps.

I posted an audio smidgen—only about seven minutes long, if memory serves—on Iterations of Zero yesterday, though it was recorded a week ago. People don’t seem to be responding much to those, so I may relegate them to history’s anonymous junk heap and go back to trying to find time to write about such topics instead of simply moaning and groaning aloud about them.  That’s fine, though.  Written language is more efficient.  It’s also the lifeblood of civilization, besides being the love of my life.

I did, though, on a whim whose source I can’t really credit, decide yesterday to start doing audio for my second latest short story Penal Colony.  I had no specific plans for how much to do, but before I’d finished for the day, I’d recorded about forty-seven minutes of unedited audio, getting more than thirty percent through the story (based on Kindle’s reckoning).  I’d forgotten how much I enjoy reading my stories aloud.  I may go back to it in something like earnest (but not like Frank, I don’t like that guy), doing audio for Free Range Meat, and then resuming the audio for The Chasm and the Collision, for which I think I stopped after chapter nine.  Then, who knows, maybe my other books and stories will follow.

It’s gonna be some time before I get to doing audio for Unanimity, though.  Just thinking about it is daunting.

As further evidence of my gradual but hopeful improvement of chronic mood disorder, I sent out copies of the latest version of Unanimity and my partially complete novella with the working title Safety Valve to my sister and to a dear friend from my youth (both of whom share my love of reading), just in case, as I think I put it, something happens to me.  This may seem morbid and not at all non-depressed at first glance, but it’s a departure.  When I’m deeply in the throes of depression, I become almost completely nihilistic at numerous levels, such that I think that if I die, I really don’t care what happens to my writing, no matter how much work has gone into it…and there has been a LOT of work.  Needless to say, if I were to die, I would not then care what happened to my writing, but the me now can care—or not—about things that the nonexistent future me will be unable to choose to care about or not…if that makes any sense.

Anyway, the fact that I did it shows at least some improvement.  It’s still possible that I might do something successfully self-destructive*, but at least I’m acting to prophylax against such occurrences.

As for other things…I’m studiously avoiding following the process of the presidential trial in the Senate.  I already feel a thoroughgoing contempt for pretty much everyone involved in the government—and by extension many of the people who keep electing them—and in my currently improving but still-fragile mood, I just don’t need the exposure to all the stupidity, vanity, ignorance with wings, hubris, manipulation (successful and otherwise), and petty monkey-poop throwing by a collection of supposed public servants who actually serve no one but themselves, and don’t even do that very well.  It’s spectacles such as these that lead me to the calm, resigned feeling that, hey, it’s not such a big loss if humanity, and even the whole planet Earth, just withers and dies.  It’s gonna happen someday anyway; it might as well be sooner rather than later.

I can do without reinforcing that feeling.  It’s already hard enough to argue against it logically; I’d like to curb the emotion.  Otherwise, I might start working on a doomsday machine of my own to see if I can hasten the end.

Don’t worry, don’t worry.  At least as of now, I’m not doing any such thing.

Humanity doesn’t really need my help, do they?

TTFN

*Of course, there are always external dangers to life and limb for us all, and sooner or later they do catch up to us, but I tend to be by far the greatest threat to my own continued existence.

by

Art thou not, fatal Vision, sensible to feeling as to sight? Or art thou but a blogger of the mind…

2020

Hello, good morning, happy Thursday, and—of course—Happy New Year!

It’s 2020 (AD or CE), a year that I’ve personally dubbed #TheYearofSeeingClearly*.  My book giveaway is now officially over, sad though that may be.  For those of you who took advantage, I hope you’re enjoying or will soon be enjoying your chosen books or stories.

I haven’t posted anything on Iterations of Zero since my last blog post here…the last two musical posts went out on December 25th.  However, given that the holidays have been underway, I feel it’s okay to give myself one week of a miss.  Now, however, there is no further excuse.  It’s a new year**, and even a new decade by most people’s reckoning, and while there may be nothing magical about the transition, it does serve as a good psychological milestone by which to set one’s goals for self-improvement.

I like the idea of striving to see clearly in this new year because of its coincidental numbering.  It would be nice if we could encourage people around the world to use this year to become more aware of their biases and blind spots, to work at removing the beams from their own eyes so that they can—when necessary—assist neighbors who have asked them to pluck out an occluding mote.  Of course, there’s a bit of a contradiction in trying to encourage other people the world over to be less critical of others and instead to try to look at themselves a bit more harshly with an eye to self-improvement.  Isn’t the very promulgation of such advice a violation of its own precepts?

Maybe in a small way, but it’s not advice that’s focused or targeted on any one person, but on us all, especially on me.  Goodness knows I have plenty of room for improvement, self- and otherwise.

I am, however, trying to achieve such improvements, on several fronts, though I try not to be overly ambitious on each of them, lest they get in each other’s way.  One thing I’ve learned at least to some degree by this stage in my life: you can’t let the “perfect” be the enemy of the good.  I’ve long tended toward an attitude of ruthless perfectionism with respect to myself, with the additional, cruel parenthetical that I know that I can never be perfect, so I can never be good enough.  However, as I’ve pondered things throughout the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that, except regarding quite simplistic processes and ideas, the very notion of perfection is mostly vacuous.

It’s also limiting.

To say that we are shooting for perfection implies that there is some upper limit beyond which we can never go.  But as math and science seem to show us, there is no real upper limit to many processes.  We can always improve, always find ways to make ourselves, and our cultures, and our creations, better.

Einstein is reputed to have said that there are only two infinite things:  the universe and human stupidity…and he wasn’t sure about the universe.  That statement about infinite human stupidity—perhaps infinite ignorance would be a better way to think of it—implies an infinite potential for human improvement.  We can keep getting better, as individuals and as a whole, without ever reaching a stopping point, until the end of time itself, if there is such a thing.

One may never reach the peak of an infinitely high mountain, but one can climb higher and higher, and be able to see farther and farther, to ever more distant horizons, with new vistas, filled with wonders one couldn’t have expected, because to have expected them, one would have already had to know what one hadn’t yet discovered.  And obviously one can’t do that.  We cannot ever, in principle, predict the specific shape of future discoveries and knowledge before they are created, for to predict them, we would already have to know them, which we don’t.  Quantum Electro-Dynamics***.

So, it is with a guarded sense of optimism that I approach the new year and new decade, and I hope you are also able to be reasonably optimistic, while still always maintaining a habit of self-improvement, and trying to see as clearly as you’re able.

Finally, with respect to writing/authoring news, Unanimity is coming along well and should be out sometime in the early part—at least the first half—of this year, hopefully followed shortly by Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.  And whither then, I cannot tell.

TTFN

*Yes, I had the temerity to give it a hashtag.  It’s probably an unjustified bit of wishful thinking, in any case.  There’s little reason to expect people to see any more clearly, metaphorically, just because the year is 2020 than we ever have before.  But maybe we will.

**Though, admittedly, as I think I’ve said before, “new year”, “new week”, “new month”, etc., are arbitrary notions.  There’s nothing special from an astronomical point of view about any particular point in our planet’s orbit around the sun.

***In other words, “QED”.  That’s my little physics/philosophy joke.

Man on top of a mountain standing contemplates the dawn