The 2024 Novel Writing Tools Bundle

I am a sucker for online bundle deals.  They are such a modern, fun way to get a lot of content at a good price -- some of them are even "pay what you want".  Some of they send a percent to a charity: in this case you have the option to donate to the Neil Peart Brain Cancer Research Fund.  Here is a bundle that I heard about from Kevin J. Anderson, and he would know, since he is the curator.

This is The 2024 Novel Writing Tools Bundle, and you can find it here until Nov 30.  My little screen grab does not show all the book included, but I wanted to highlight the one by KJA called "On Being a Dictator."

I have always admired his ability to be out hiking at some amazing location and dictate chapters of his books into some device.  I have tried it a few times, but hearing my own voice makes me self-conscious around people, or immediately knocks me out of story mode.  Or both.  I just can't get enough separation to make it work, so that's the book I wanted most, and I hope some of the others can help me feel relevant or productive again.

I just wanted to pass this along.  A good little library put together by a good guy for a good cause.  Worth sharing.

Another Sale or Two, new Poems and new Blanks

I sold another poem to Dreams & Nightmares last week and have a flash fiction coming out in Flash Digest (Jan 2025).  I really need to get more submissions out there.

I brought some scrap paper to a winery in Escondido about 3 weeks back, where Astra Kelly was playing.  Look her up.  When there is live music playing, it helps disconnect me from day-to-day worries, and I can fill a few pages with poems and fragments.  So I got some new pieces done, none of them especially "genre", so I don't have any idea where to send them.  I don't know what's up with the vast percent of "literary" zines paying copies only.  I am not expecting a ton of $$, but zero is too low for me.

I have posted plenty of articles on my various blogs, so those are rolling along nicely.

Today we drove up to Ramona and did some thrifting before seeing Astra again at a different winery.  This time, the pages stayed blank.

I have ideas in my head.  Some new story settings.  Some old tales to dredge up and overhaul after 20-30 years of dust.  

I also want to get a few mini-collections into PDFs for DriveThruFiction.com.  I must have gathered over 200 titles from DriveThruRPG over the years, and you would think that the fiction cousin of that site would be a good match for me.  But you know how creative minds sabotage themselves -- I have had works on many sites over decades and failed to get a single actual sale, so when you get onto a site with hundreds of thousands of competing items, you expect to be just a drop in a bucket.  I can see myself spending hours getting this set up, only to get nothing out of it.

But it's still a bug in my ear this week.  Meant to do it, got hung up on other things.

That is the writing news for this week, such as it is...

Astra, Dresden, Big John, Elric and Other Old Friends

We were sick most of the last two weeks, but got back on our feet and went a few places this weekend.  

On Saturday we went to the Mia Marie Winery on Highland Valley Road, only three exits and four miles up the winding road from Anne's place.  Astra Kelly was playing, which was a treat since she had just moved to Arizona and I wasn't expecting to see her in town again.  Then again, I hadn't seen her play since before COVID, you know, before so many things broke down and don't feel as real anymore.

Some things I wanted to point out: she let's you know where she's going to be appearing and brings swag to her shows.  So many creative people have completely forgotten to send out newsletters.  I would get to more shows if to performers would give any kind of advance notice.  Half the time, I only know a show happened when someone posts about it on Facebook it after it's over.  And most musicians have given up on bringing actual items -- CDs, anything you can buy -- to help them out.  Honestly, a tip jar and a blurb about how you can find their stuff somewhere online (sometimes followed by mumbling about how the downloads don't pay shit) doesn't really cut it.  Astra brought her new release on vinyl, several past CDs at a reasonable price, some of her aromatherapy items, and other bits of projects I never knew about.  Apparently she is now the voice of a cat on Instagram.  That is how you do it.

One thing she had that I had never seen before was a "download card".  That was a little plastic card like the ones you get Google Play points on, except it has a URL and a code, and if you enter the code at the URL then poof, you get the download as promised.  As a pleasant bonus, she included both MP3 files and high-fi WAV files.  You can find her here.

(Nov 3 note: we saw her again today, this time in Ramona, and she had her whole shop with her again.  It was nice seeing people walk over and check out her things, and Kim at the wine counter was talking about how "crafty" she was.  If we don't let people know what we do, how will they ever know?)

That was inspiring for whenever I have an upcoming event.  I would rather bring too much than not have anything to show.

Now on Sunday, we went down to Balboa Ave to check out Book-Off, a big jam-packed bookstore where I found the first Dresden Files novel a few weeks back.  I didn't really plan on spending any money, but there was a gorgeous, like-new four volume set of all the Elric stories.  Michael Moorcock had always been inspiring to me, from his writing style and imagination to his works on Blue Oyster Cult albums.  I enjoy when someone can be creative across art forms and genres.  I root for underdogs and far-out creativity. This set was not cheap, but once in a while I see a definitive set of something, and feel like a collector again.  I had to have it.  Throw in a nice trade paperback Game of Thrones for $5.

Meanwhile, I got the new Jeff Vandermeer book "Absolution" from Barnes & Noble, and it dives right back into the crazy creepy Southern Reach world that started with "Annihilation".  I expect to ramble about that in the future.  Jeff and Ann Vandermeer have edited many magazines and projects, and I even submitted a story or two and I was never accepted, and they wouldn't know me from a bump on a log, but I can enjoy being a fan sometimes.  Anyway, I believe today was the official release date, so poof: mentioned.

As for the Dresden Files, I read book one (Storm Front) again, and it's such a quirky world, a real gem.  It is hard to make a supernatural setting that's even 10% different from all the rest, and these books have character to spare.  He does get beaten to a pulp more than he should be able to recover from, but that mix of crime noir and White Council shenanigans is classic.

We watched the whole series, and I have no complaint about it: I thought the cast did a fine job, and don't care that they had to shuffle the episodes or make monsters easier to film.  Paul Blackstone was top notch although blah blah he doesn't fit the exact description in the book.  He gets points for personality and holding together the mix of humanity and madness.  I've read pages and pages of gripes and production issues, but I enjoyed it back then, and just as much this time around.  My only complaint was that it ended after only 12 episodes. 

One of the monsters in the Storm Front episode, loosely built on that first book I had just read, replaced an ugly toad demon with ... big John DeSantis from Master and Commander.  Hey, I knew that guy.

John was an all-around nice guy every time I saw him on or off the set.  After M & C, it was always a treat to see him guest star in my favorite shows, from Supernatural (a golem) to Stargate (Jafaa warrior) to all the other places he showed up, and in 13 Ghosts, OMG he was terrifying.  It must be weird to only get the meanest, most evil roles when he just wanted to kick back and chat -- he definitely knows how to use his looks and voice.  I always wish him the best out there in show biz.

Here is a shot of John DeSantis and I from the Master & Commander wrap party 20-odd years ago.

Memory lane ...

So this has been an indirect tribute to the people we meet in this mad creative life.  They feel like friends when we see them at shows, or at conventions, or on the page or on the screen.  Maybe we never actually sat down over dinner, or went on road trips together, but "acquaintance" never felt sufficient.  As for the fictional characters, they fill niches in my mind in other ways.

BTW, all or most of the Dresden Files books are available as audiobooks read by James Marsters, who has a great voice to these.  I enjoy listening to them with Anne after hours.

I wrote 8 or 10 poems while Astra was singing, and I hope some of these things help to rip more works out of the depths and onto paper.

A Week On My Own again (again?)

My girlfriend was down in Puerto Vallarta this week, so I had so much free time to do my own thing.  Theoretically.  Aside from the days that were completely ruined by full-time job and commute.  So that left two hours on weeknights and then the weekend.

I was able to put together a new draft of the collaborative collection I have been working on, and get it emailed out.  This meant pulling out stories and poems that were not as well liked as the others, then putting in some new pieces of mine and splitting the whole thing into three logical (roughly genre delimited) sections to make it a bit more interesting.

The regular Thursday zoom call was a real treat.  Some of the new (to me) folks were there (JJ and others), but also two writer/publishers I have known for 20-30 years.  Between the host and those two, and I, we must have appeared together in 200 or more publications since the 80s.  We've all published each other's work when we working editorial roles.  So I'm afraid we took over, talking like old times, and the others slowly wandered off.

Yesterday, I drove down to Ocean Beach to work some more on that collection in person.  There was one piece that was a haibun in two sections -- each section a paragraph & ku, but we found that there was a time slip in there, and new in-between scenes were needed to tie it together in a tighter package.  So that was fun.  I was hoping to write several new pieces together, but a chunk of the limited time was taken up by computer issues and me having to loop 15 blocks back to my car because I forgot my darn reading glasses.  I could just barely read without them, but knew it would bring on a headache.  

So, it was a nice foggy day on the coast with some chill in the air.

Driving home, I had a head full of words.  And with certain instrumental pieces playing, I had half-formed poems where the words fit the rhythm of the song exactly.  But is that even a thing?

Back at Anne's place (totally quiet sanctuary, no cats or dog), I had to do my usual 2-3 hours each weekend of writing up descriptions for the stamps we sell online.  Anne does the scans, and there was a huge backlog to get to.  But since I am trying to keep my brain in writing mode, I ended up researching a few of those stamp issues, and adding four non-trivial blog posts about them:

Wendy Fitzwilliam (Miss Universe 1998)

Angola Classic Animals

An Industrial Nightmare from Saar

and

Selvage markings: Registration marks 

I have to admit that I work in bursts and after a big gap I will back-date the new stuff to make it look more natural.

And today, back in Escondido, it was mid-90s and sunny.  I got back to my place (2 cats but the dog is still in day care) and wrote up 4 blog entries for my games blog and started on this update to my Writer's Life blog.

I have no new sales to report.  No new submissions, really.  But I am still getting things done.  Collaboration work, a zoom call with other writers, and 9 blog posts, with other drafts in progress. 

The image is from our trip to OBCoffee: my pumpkin spice chai with a very Buddhist tree-of-life motif in the foam.

"I knew if I looked back there would be nothing there"

I got a day of PTO, so we took a 3-day weekend at a hotel a few blocks from Old Town, San Diego.  I did not check ahead and had no idea it was Comic-Con weekend until after I booked the room.  As for getting out and doing things, it was a stressful part of town for driving and there was no parking at any of the spots we thought we wanted to walk around.

But the goal of the weekend was to relax.  Good luck there.  My brain is always a waterfall of words and imagery, but I did find enough quiet that I could hear the flow and tap into it.  Like old times, but this time everything came out in top form.  I ended up writing four poems of 3-4 pages each.  Two were for illustrations that a fellow poet sent me as writing prompts -- those works just poured out with the world lore snapping into place as needed.

One was a flash fiction in disguise, about a thing we almost saw under a bridge at the I-5/I-8 interchange.  I was surprised that I choked up at the end when reading it to Anne, but it was a sensitive topic and things went dark quickly.  Then tonight, when I got home and typed it up as a proper flash piece, I had a writing moment that I was quite proud of.  You see, the hand-written piece ended with, "I knew if I looked back there would be nothing there."  Baloney.  I hate that kind of non-ending.  So when I sat at the laptop, I typed, "I looked anyway," and wondered if something had been hiding there all along.  What happened in just four lines was a real vision of horror: nothing commonplace or expected, a strange mix of light and dark, a glimpse beyond the veil that I hope will grip readers if it ever sees print.  The final piece was 480 words.

I have always loved flash fiction.  Sometimes, so much can be packed into a page or two, if your words throw out subtle feelers into the real world and the things we think we already know, and then the story goes off the rails in a different way.

My other piece was about a woman whose life was ruined by tornadoes.  Yes, we saw Twisters on opening weekend, but it wasn't about that at all.  Ever since then, I had a kind of sing-song nonsense in my head which was roughly, "Blah blah blah blah, a twister in her head."  Repeating, with dumb variations.  But I pulled it in, tamed it, gave it form, and again choked up at the end when I tried reading it to Anne.

Good.  If it doesn't affect me emotionally, what are the odds that anyone else will care?

We did get out on Sunday to meetup with a writer friend I had known for 25 years but have not seen much since the divorce (10 years past).  That was the highlight of the weekend. 

On the way home today, we stopped at Balboa Park and walked over to the Japanese Friendship Garden to relax in the restful environment.  More about that later.  But I did write two short poems, and right after Anne got a call that one of her neighbors/friends had died, a haiku about it.  And we made our way home.  Fine weekend, boosted by new writing but tainted by news.

A Week on My Own (Again?)

A post from 2022 started with, "Odd weekend, since Anne left around 11am Saturday to go to Santa Ana to see two sisters from out of town and I had the whole weekend to do my own thing, whatever that turned out to be."

How times have (not) changed: Anne left around 11am last Friday to go to Santa Ana to see two sisters from out of town and I have until newxt Monday to do my own thing, whatever that turned out to be.

I found myself going through boxes again.  It's a bit annoying how my creative life got thrown into boxes and stuck in closets over and over again.  Now, there are whole bankers boxes full of "stuff".  I am sorting those into a box of old printed manuscripts, a box of notebooks & journals, anything that looks like art, a pile of music-related bits, plus a box to shred, a box for scrap paper, and a box to recycle.  

I also have about 4 bankers boxes full of old contributor copies for every zine I ever contributed to.  And another box of issues I was not in, but they were part of subscriptions or whatever.  I remember getting a lifetime subscription to Dreams & Nightmares for $50 back around 1989, and they're still putting out issues.  I promised myself I would keep them all together, but they're all over in different boxes, tucked onto shelves and such.

I also updated my "convention box" of available copies of chapbooks and zines to take to conventions or writer meetups.  A creative person should always have some things available for sale, even though I suck at selling things.

Those printed mss are obsolete but maybe some family member would be interested in getting a Priority Mail flat rate box full of weird stuff.  Sadly, the 2 or 3 boxes I sent to my Mom way back when came back to me after she died and we went out to Arizona to clean out her apartment.  2007?  Hard to believe she's been gone for 17 years.

I wrote some small new pieces and started typing up missing bits from old tiny notebooks from 2002 and 2007.  Normally, when I type up a piece, I put a checkbox with my manuscript code on it, plus a big check mark.  What code?  It's simply the piece of work (A for art, F for fiction, NF for nonfiction, P for poems) followed by a two year code, then the sequential number within the year.  So the flash fiction I just adapted from an old scribble became F24-2, the second story of 2024.

I spent a few hours updating my list of open markets.  So many of the ones from 10 years ago are gone.  It seems like they all have too many rules now.  The submissions pages are so bossy, with things like "We will not tolerate line breaks between paragraphs," or "If you submit again before you hear back from us, you will be banned for life."  It's not a hardcode combat video game, folks.  We're working together to come up with little volumes of goodies.  I never blocked anyone in all my years as an editor, never micromanaged.  Some of my favorite submissions showed up in the mailbox as manila envelopes full of handwritten scraps and doodles.

Anyway, I mostly received a very warm welcome from the editors I know who were still active, and placed a handful of stories and poems.

I also spent time updating all my spreadsheets, so I don't accidentally send out reprints without knowing it.  And I started a new WordPress page with all new credits pages, because 90% of the links on my old site were broken.  It was just easier to update all sources side-by-side in one long project.

Strange old notebooks

I have been clearing out boxes and boxes of old papers, cases where my creative life had to be swept into boxes and stuffed in corners to make room for "real life".  There's quite an assortment in those boxes: old printed manuscripts (including 3 or 4 full novels), doodles, sketches, loose pages I jotted down "pieces" on, and whole notebooks from different years.  

The notebooks are fascinating.  A typical notebook of mine might have 10 pages of math problems, maybe 5 pages of notes for games I never finished, more pages of planned factory lines and buildings for Minecraft worlds, plain journal pages, dream logs, notes from road trips, and lots of writing interlaced with sketchy bits.  The trouble is, I would use one notebook for a while and misplace it, then start another one, find the old one a year later on continue in that one, then not be able to find either one, so now I have a red notebook.  The notebooks are never entirely comfortable.  They may be too big to go covertly to a music night at a bar -- on those occasions I just bring blank sheets of paper folded in quarters.  In hotel rooms or convention events, I like a bigger notebook for more room to scribble.

I'm sure that some of these notebooks look like the ravings of a crazy person.  And in some cases, I was on a bus down in Baja, bumping along and trying to fit tiny words into a pocket-sized notebook.  Yes, I found the notebook that I kept in my pocket/sleeves while on the set of "Master and Commander".  Some of those pages got really sloppy from being bumped and jostled.  I was always able to write small, down to letters barely a millimeter high at times.  Sometimes the lighting is bad and words might overlap.  After I hit 40 my eyesight started to go downhill, so I would find myself writing words that were just a blur at the time.

If you look more closely, patterns will appear.  I usually put a date at the top of a blank page; for the past few decades it's always YYMMDD format, but I did MMDDYY before that so there were some grey areas where the numbers might go either way.  On tiny pages, I wrote poems as unbroken chunks of text with a slash for a line break and two slashes for the end of a thought.  Sometimes I had an empty head when looking at a new page and a doodle came out instead of words.  Sometimes, words were part of the doodle, other times the words went around it.  Sometimes all that came out was another damn TO DO list.

I'm posting a scans of a few pages here, hoping to entertain.  Maybe your own works have similar patterns and issues.  They all make sense to me, and flipping open an old notebook is like finding a silver mine full of quirks and oddities, thoughts from some previous version of me that I can expand on.  This week, I have found some old pieces that I want to flesh out, essentially collaborating with Myself From Twelve Years Ago".

Enjoy.