Zoom Group

One of the highlights of what's left of my creative life is the Thursday writers group run by Terrie Relf.  Two weeks ago we had an all-star line-up with Tyree Campbell, David  C. Kopaska-Merkel, Terrie, and David Lee Summers.  It's a shame it starts at 4, since I'm usually stuck in work and traffic until 5:30.  But sometimes I can cut out early.  Two other guests signed off right after I got there.

It was nice to reminisce about projects from 20-30 years ago and chat about new things.  DCKM and I have written one rengay (connected haiku) together, and are stuck on stanza four of the next one.  I could just ask if it's ready to be submitted anywhere, and he said he always starts with Star*Line.  Good pick. I was able to ask where the group would send a certain type of story (my 8K Lovecraftian adventure that got rejected), and got good recommendations.  I think they both turned out to be no-pay markets when I looked them up, though.  Maybe I should run it by Asimov's first, even if it's a long shot.  They should probably reject one of those 3 poems I sent in July before I send more.

Tyree mentioned that his first few publications were in Linns Stamp Journal way back in the day.  The next weekend, when I went to an event at the local post office, instead of just dropping it on my blog, I sent it to Linns.  It's odd that I have rarely written anything about philatelic subjects.  I guess my sticking point is that I have no deep expertise on any subject.  My blog is mostly observations and odd items I find.  But that one piece did get sent to Linns, thanks to Tyree.  Still no word on our story/poem collection that he has been working on.

It may be a while before I can get back there again.

I have no new writing to report on.  A few more poetry acceptances, and a few more contrib copies came in.

We're planning a trip to Sedona at the end of October, so maybe I can clear my head and get something done then.

Anyway, point is ... the writing group is great for support and feeling a part of a society.  It's not the kind where we sit around and write critiques.  When everyone involved has hundreds of published credits, it's more a matter of just keep doing what we do, for whatever reason that is.

Side Quest: Into the Archives

I had an interesting side quest last week where the librarian of the SFPA asked me if I could find a poem I published in Alpha Adventures back in May 1988.  It was written by Jovanka Kink, and I had been contacted by someone through Facebook a few months previously, but I looked for it a few times with no luck.  And I find any communication through Facebook to be awkward.  Terrible UI, tiny little fields to type in, weird security/sharing issues, the works.

It's not a given that someone can find an item that small from almost 40 years ago.  I was living in Connecticut back when that issue went to print, and have moved a dozen times in the intervening years. I kept checking the old bankers boxes full of contributor copies of things, but it turned out it was on a shelf: a stack of old, thin digest-sized zines squished between some books.

I snapped a shot of the cover and the poem and sent it to the librarian, which to the librarian probably felt like completing a quest as well.  I worried for a while that it might have been accepted for the very last issue of AA, which was canceled.  At the time, I was starting up an office of software developers in So Cal, and converting the print Alpha Adventures t the short lived CD magazine AlphaDrive, which only ran two issues but was a lot of multimedia fun to put together.

Anyway ... Librarian tasks are so few and far between these days.  Quest completed.

Mythos mayhem

About a month ago, I saw an anthology looking for Mythos tales revisiting the classic "At the Mountains of Madness" by Lovecraft.  They were looking for stories set in the past, present and future.  I have always wanted to write exactly such a tale, so it put this idea in my head.

The guidelines gave a limit of 6000 words, which I hope is not firm.  After having the idea in my head for a week or two, I felt it would come out to 7500 words.  In fact, the first draft had an opening scene, then a flashback to an expedition, then back to the main story, and ended at 7200 words.  But every time I thought it was done, especially while trying to sleep, I would think of some other detail to add or remove.  Two characters had to be added to the first expedition to make the final conflict more tragic and crazy.

Of course, I reread the original book, which is one of my favorites of all time, even if it had no proper characters or dialog by modern standards.  It was about atmosphere and mystery.  I hope my tale is a worthy recollection to the setting. 

Then I did a serious round of word refinement, removing "that" and "seems like" and "feels like" and "that".  These are such weak and dead words.  They had to go, along with most of the "-ing" words where verbs pretend to be adjectives, and most of the extra adverbial fluff.

Then I did a round of research, finding old survey maps and scanning Google maps for mountains with the right shapes, so that when I mentioned a place of the coordinates of a place, the reader can go to that real location and explore for themselves.  I knew the basic geography of Antarctica and most of the modern research going on there.  But I didn't want to be caught saying something that wasn't accurate.

Then I did a round of research on exactly the type of ship involved in that first expedition, and what gear was on board and what the conditions would be like living there for months.

What bugged the most about doing so many revisions?  Finding lines in the middle that refer to things that were removed a week ago.  No, that scene never happened, sure can't talk about it later in the story. 

I almost never edit a piece as much as this one.  It's the most complex thing I have written in 20 years, and really felt like practice for a novel.

The last few times I looked at it, I only went back to review the head count (literally) and change a few words in the big finale.  It ended up at 8300 words.  It could easily be 10K if I went back and flooded it with more detail, but I went for a sleek action story.

I sent it to my beta reader.  With luck, there are no more dangling bits to fix.  I want to get it out to the anthology soon ... 

 

May update: New collection

I have poems in Dreams & Nightmares #129 (Jan 2025) and #130 (May 2025).  I enjoy sending poems to David: there are a lot of times that I will finish a piece and his name pops right into my head.  About one out of four times I actually do send it in a batch with some others, and then he always picks the one I didn't think he would like as much.

Also, I heard back from the local Escondido Arts Partnership anthology (Summation 17) that two of the poems I wrote about artworks in the January art exhibit were accepted, so that volume should be coming out in the Fall.

The big news: 

Our upcoming story/poem/art collection is almost here. It will be called "Flights & Shadows" by Scott Virtes & Terrie Leigh Relf.  With the names swapped in various places to be fair.  It was quite a process. We chose our own works, then sending batches to each other and picking from those.  Then getting together at a coffee shop in Ocean Beach to work on revisions and extend each other's pieces.  And we wrote one new once on the fly to wrap it up: it started off as a one line writing prompt from months ago, and turned into a twisting, in-your-face adventures that surprised both of us.  We included a lot of my old doodles, and I convinced T to add some of her own sketches.  Finally, I took a book cover I composed back in 2009 for a project that was never published, tweaked a few of the layers, and now all the pieces are done and in production.

It is not limited to one genre.  It is more of a celebration of just how many different kinds of stories can be conjured.  Although our styles feel different in the pieces we composed separately, I think they blend seamlessly in the ones we worked together on.  

That was the project of the year.  I hope to have some more news soon. 

Voice of the Dead Reunion

I have been a writing slump lately.  I can't think of any fiction worth writing as the world is coming unglued and people are losing the ability to tell fact from fiction, and AI is wrecking every form of creativity, and everybody wants to be an "influencer" (God I hate that word) whether they know shit about anything or not.

I never heard back from the anthology at the museum in town.  We went to another art show event and I asked someone who seemed to be in charge, and she just dismissed me like I was just some dum-dum who had no idea how publishing works.  Yeah, I'm coming up on my 40th anniversary of my first published works.  I don't see anything wrong with asking if anyone knew where the zine was at.

And we never heard back from the big story/poem collection we put together and delivered at the end of the year.

But there was one big highlight this weekend.  It was a zoom call for the 20th anniversary of one of the short films I wrote way-back-when.  It was Voice of the Dead, produced by Cohen Phillips and his whole family.  One of my favorite film projects, even though it was shot in Missouri and I was in San Diego.  We had such a good rapport and such good communication that I really felt like I was there.  It was so nice to see some of the cast and crew again.  Who knew that two of the ghost characters I made up would get married in real life?  Good times.

Oddly, the version of the script in my "scripts" folder was just the first two pages.  I have no idea why the full script isn't in my archive.

I will try to gather a few more pieces and get this post updated soon.

 

 

2024 End of Year update

In early December (12/7) there was an event in downtown Escondido for the unveiling of a new mural.  We like to go to those just to see the arts in action, and we always enjoy murals and outdoor art.

It was a great mural with a hummingbird theme by Brenda Townsend.  I wrote three haiku based on the art and handed it to her as a gift.   I have done that before at art shows, it's a quirk of mine.  I like the challenge.  It's called ekphrastic writing, starting with an image and being inspired to find words.  She later got back to me and was very appreciative.

It turns out that the whole Arts Council was at that event so I got to hear about s lot of other events.

The next weekend there was an art show where pets were specifically invited to write about the art.   We only had about an hour since we were trying to get to an Eve Selis concert directors by 6:30.  But the place was packed,  I wrote six pieces in a tiny notebook,  meet some nice people,  and hit the highway.

I later found the address to submit these pieces to the annual anthology and got 3 submitted.  The others were not about specific artworks on display.

Beyond that, Terrie Leigh Relf and i finished the collection we've been working on since August and got it submitted to the publisher on 12-31.  Hit the deadline that was in my head the whole time.

Poems, Posts and Prostrations

In the last half of November, I did manage to get some writing done.  It comes after my full-time job and two side gigs ... at the end of all that, I do get some time to try to be creative.

I wrote a few pages of poems in a tiny notebook at the E.R. while Anne was passed out from what turned out to b electrolyte issues (??).  

I think I added 8 more entries to my Gaming blog, 4 more to my WordFixx blog, and 8 to my Stamps blog.

Today we went down to Ocean Beach to hang out at the coffee shop with a collaborator and work on our upcoming collections some more.  We swapped a new story in, and I found a photo of the two of us from a poetry reading 18 years ago, which fit just fine.

We started on a new piece, where we start with a sentence and each add a few lines, trying to leave the other writer with a difficult hook to work out.  Those are fun.  The story took some really odd turns.  When I got home, I gave it a tune-up so it sounds like we meant to end up where we did.  And I had to do some research into the actual layouts of morgues and mortuaries, so we could make the setting feel more real than some generic thing we saw on a TV show.

We would like to get that collection done and submitted by the end of the year.  We hit the 30,000 word mark, chock full of fiction, flash fiction and poems, with about 15 of my own weird illustrations.  

I have not had time to send out any submissions in a while.  If it's not one thing, it's another.

This all came out to about 35-40 pages of new material.

I threw "prostrations" in the title, because that word has been coming up as we watch the last season of Stargate SG-1 (where they are fighting the obnoxious Ori), and several times Anne said it sounds like such a strange word.  While it can be a religious expression (giving completely in to a higher power), I can now point out that when she was in the E.R. she was prostrated (rendered helpless with exhaustion or a similar condition).  We have both been exhausted, but every weekend when we try to relax we end up running errands, doing chores, working the side gigs and just not resting.

Posted on DriveThruFiction

I must have purchased over 100 items from DriveThruRPG over the years.  They're one of the largest markets of PDF and print and print-on-demand gaming books.  More and more works have become available from the 80s and 90s from classic game systems.  So I have whole folders of RPG reference material from them, and recently bought a huge bundle that ended up being about 50 PDF books for Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition.  Wow.  It's never-ending.

They always seemed like a very active market, with a lot of free preview editions and Pay What You Want items.  I have known for years that they had a sister site for fiction: DriveThruFiction.  I'm just not sure why I never thought to list any of my own items there.

This weekend I set up three of my existing poetry chapbooks.  They were already in PDF format, so there wasn't much work to do.  Their forms were fairly simple.  There was an interesting part where (if your documents is a PDF) you can choose a page range to make an automatic preview document.  So if I wanted to showcase page 6 to 9 as my free preview, just enter 6 and 9.  You could upload a cover and some other graphics, then upload the main document and click "Make Public."  You get a message saying to allow up to 3 days for the submission to be approved.  That's reasonable.  I like that content is approved by someone before appearing on the marketplace.

It turns out, all three were approved by noon the next day, and that was a sunday.  So here they are:

I will be adding more documents, probably newer editions of past books and chapbooks.  My author page is here.

I don't know if this will be worth the time.  For most sites with tons of content, you always feel like just another fish in the ocean.  If a site has a half million items and only 10 of them are yours, you are just a tiny percentage.  And these are just Pay What You Want with recommended $2 each. They are just 27-30 page booklets -- old poetry chaps won't be popular, but I thought their poetry collection could use a little more weird.  ;-).  Still, most of my creative output has been for pizza money, so maybe this can earn a salad somewhere down the line.

I tried doing some research, and you can always find videos and blogs talking about how every attempt to promote work is always a waste of time.  Or similar content saying how wonderful it is, and how this one person makes thousands of $$ a month.  What's real and what isn't?

You never know unless you try, and it's another platform where I am now visible in some form.  I will try to report in future posts about how it works out. 

I realize that most of the content on these sites was submitted by publishers, or at least very small companies.  I can't see going through the trouble of establishing yet another business name.  I'm just an author offering my own works.  All of the rights reverted back to me at some point, and I should be able to use them as I see fit.