May 2026 Stuff & Photos

Time flies, now it's May.  Almost June.  I did get about 25 submissions sent out in the last few months and just heard back about 5 poems being accepted by the Plutonian Shores anthology by Weird Wide Web.  I got two new short stories and a few poems written in between work and distractions.

Thanks to the Thursday group that I was able to attend a few times last year, I ended up writing a few poems with David C. Kopaska-Merkel, and we got an acceptance on a piece called "interweave" to be published in the may 2027 issue of Scifaikuest.

On the unexpected side, Anne wanted us to go through the thousands of photos I have taken on our trips over the last few years, to print up the best photos to frame and put on the walls around her house.  She finally got tired of the old generic art that was there.  It was fun looking at those old memories, and I was a bit amazed to see the quality of the best images when printed on glossy paper at Staples, straight from the phone.  I guess the phone effectively has 11x14 resolution, and they look crisp and gorgeous on the walls.  So it's a reminder of yet another unbankable skill of mine.  But a pleasure to dig them up and see them on display.  Here is one from Lake Havasu City:

It made me wonder if I could get big prints (36x36" maybe?) f some of my best fractal art from the 90s and get them into one of the local art shows.  They have a great variety of themes and rotating exhibits.  But I can picture myself standing there defending against every idiot who's going to say, "It's AI, you're a lowlife cheater."  It is NOT AI.  There's a big difference between computer rendered (CG) art that might have taken hours to set up and just typing a prompt and having the work handed to you (AI).  AI is fucking up everything.

So there are always these multiple talents fighting for my limited time.  I should stick to written works.  Even if I never write another pieces, I have over 1000 pieces which have never been published, and about 800 that could run again as reprints.

Other than that, I had a 60th birthday where I gave away some old books and zines.  We enjoy giving things away.  I'm okay with the reality that I will almost never make any money selling stuff in person.  I far prefer sending works to existing publications, where the $5 or $10 or $50 per story or poem turns into pizza money and there is no in-person pressure.  Not to mention almost never being "in person" with any actual person anymore.

My mind keeps spinning with ideas.  Watching recent series like Foundation and the Expanse does make me want to write some much bigger sci-fi projects, but the insanity of begging for hits across every social site usually snuffs out that interest.  The writing is still a talent, worth battling the empty page to pull images out of the ether, but what I don't need is a third or fourth job/gig.  My whole life is prioritized by main job (most $$), stamp business (30+ years now, decent extra $$ per month), and creative projects are always going to be after those are done.  I wish I could see some other way to go about it.

Most of my creative output is in my blogs.  The gaming blog has passed 400 articles.  The sum of them all show about 300,000 hits over the years.  I can't have comments on, because then the site just gets inundated with assholes posting porn links and scams, and I'm expected to spend valuable hours every day deleting all the rubbish.  It would be nice to hear from real people occasionally, but the spammers have broken the models.

I have those other submissions out there, and hope to have another update soon...

Fiction Crossing Reality (Conspiracy edition)

I had a story jammed in my head for the last two weeks, and as we drove around town this weekend, the last two pieces of the puzzle dropped into place.  So I took three hours on Saturday to finally write the piece.  It showed how constant exposure to conspiracy theories will wear a person down, cause actual sanity loss and tragedy.  It was only 1900 words but it was grim and emotionally difficult to write, partly because the authenticity comes from the author pulling from his own struggles.  I had to recognize that I have some of those same faults.  The weakness for doosmscrolling.

One sticky point: I needed a wife or girlfriend in the story as his sounding board, the one he calls "my anchor".  But it couldn't be Anne.  Too personal.  Private.   Hands off.  I couldn't avoid pulling in a detail or two about our own lives.  Pick and choose.

As soon as story was done, I flipped down the laptop lid and hopped into bed.  I made the mistake of checking Facebook to see what some of my creative friends have been working on.  And there it was: the shooting at the White House Correspondents dinner, and EVERY talk channel was full of brand new conspiracies, embryonic bits of crazy, doubting everything, beating strawmen to death and accusing everyone before the dust had even settled.  The cognitive dissonance of seeing Jack Cochiarella wearing a tux was bad enough.  You know ... his face would fit my character well.  But not in a suit.

When did reality become a punching bag?  Every talking head trusted by thousands or millions of people just takes the ball and spins it to fit their own rules.  There is nothing left.

The story need a bit of polish, probably next weekend.  I just thought it worth mentioning that the obviously toxic stew of crazy talk shows no signs of slowing.  Tapping into it to build up to one fictional moment was painful enough.  Facing it every day just leaves me Uncomfortably Numb.

New book: Flights & Shadows

My latest book came out last week.  It's a collaboration that I put together with Terrie Leigh Relf over the course of 2024.  All kinds of poems and stories and flash fiction, plus art and doodles and a puzzle or two.  We've known each other for over thirty years, and after some years of not feeling very productive, it was a blast to send stacks of work back and forth, to pick our favorites to include, then to work together on expanding some oldies and adding brand new work to the mix. 

Ebook for $2.99 at the Hiraeth Publishing website.  Print version $11.95.

Summation 17 book release event

Today was the book release for the Summation 17 anthology at the Escondido Art Gallery.  This was a collection of poems written to accompany art in the gallery at the end of last year.  It's a big volume of 170 pages. I have three poems in there.  

Robt O'Sullivan Schleith was in charge of the anthology and the event.  About 35 people showed up, and we started on page one ... page by page, if the artist or poet was in the house, they read their piece or talked about the art.  I wasn't really in the mood to do readings, but sure, when my name came up we I was at the mike.  It took about two hours to get through the whole presentation.

There is so much talent right here in Escondido.  I don't know why I didn't know this had been going on for 16 years.  I feel like I just barely be on the radar of the local arts scene, but I am still plagued by having no free time to invest in it.

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.