Creative Updates & a First Game

Looks like my last post was on May 24, right after I had just turned 60.  I have not done much creatively, though I will have two poems in this year's art gallery Summation anthology, two poems in a tribute to Bruce Boston, five poems in a "Plutonian Shores" anthology by Weird Wide Web.

I did a beta read of a novel for one of the tech guys at work.

On the sad side, David C. Kopaska-Merkel died, ending 40 years of correspondence and showing up together in zines of all shapes & sizes.  So, our one and only collaboration in print will turn out to be "interweave", accepted by Scifaikuest (May 27 online).  That hit me hard, as we had just spoken a month before on Terrie's Thursday writing zoom.

And ... Terrie is very ill, so our second collaborative book project is not going to happen.  I have been a pretty poor friend when it comes to calling to see if she's still there, but the weeks just fly by, all my energy drained by work and life, a heat wave, and the crumbling of society.  But those are very private things, in and around a big death in the family on Anne's side.

Still, I have a head full of things.  I decided against trying to get digital art into the gallery, mostly because if they did accept a piece (at $30 fee per submission), I would then have to spend $50-100 framing the thing (I guess), only to stand there and keep explaining how there was a world before AI, and people used to make nice things without being constantly accused of cheating and being a sell-out to humanity.

The game blog just passed 460 posts, and we have found a few new places to donate games that don't make the cut.  So I guess that's my main output these days.

On the social side, we got up to the World Science Fiction Convention in Anaheim, but only for a day.  Most of a day.  I knew if we planned too far ahead, I would spend those weeks having anxiety about what could go wrong.  So I just made the snap decision friday night to drive up for as much of Saturday as we could handle.  The drive up was non-stop anxiety ... if you knew that stretch of I-5, you have probably felt it, too.  We got there a little before 10am and it was a fairly nice day at the tail end of a heat wave.  I was adjusting to new prescription glasses that made me feel an inch too tall and off balance all the time, so I just felt crappy the whole time.  The place was fairly empty, so there was plenty of room to steer away from people and do our own thing.  We were trying to make it to 7:30 to surprise Denise at the Speculative Poetry panel, but by 4:30 the place was getting packed with people we couldn't stand it anymore. 

The event took up so much floor space and was so disconnected, that every time we did find out where to go next, it was a 10 minute walk (in the heat and distorted vision) back to where we just came from.  And with all the tools available these days, we could not find any of the 40 or 50 people I knew who said they would be there.  Be where?  Unless they were a guest at a panel, there was no communication.  Should we be looking on 40-50 different facebook accounts?  It's not like we ever text these people ... after a while the whole thing felt broken.  So much social media FAIL.  Does anyone know how to communicate anymore?  After we left, hundreds of photos started hitting the socials of all the people having events in the past.  How was that supposed to help us meet up?

Dory met Baby Yoda at the Con

The funny thing is, as Anne carried Dory (the service pup) around, and everywhere we went people wanted to meet her, we ended up scheming a little TTRPG sim of our own.  It ended up being called "Therapy Dog Goes to the Con" and is our first game release on itch.io.  Like everything else I do, I got the project completed a few days ago, and we went live with it, only to get one hit in five days.  So now I have to start pimping it out in my non-existent network, or keep adding things hoping one day SOMEthing will get noticed.

Now I have a head full of drafts of other little games.  Fun but frustrating.

On to the next ...

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.