Trying to build story collections

I had plans to look up chords for a few more songs, refine some other songs in my notebooks.  I think I spent 20 minutes playing guitar the whole weekend, which I suppose is better than zero.  Ugh.  I had plans to dig up my two best series of short stories (Micro Bob and Tenisin Willow) and flesh out those worlds for possibly new stories, but I didn't.  It's hard to try and be away from computers for a while when every damn thing is ON the computer.

Let's see, I had 3 Micro Bob stories: The Claim Pusher, In the Hole and Not Alone, and Taking Down YNOS-11, 3-5k each, from roughly 1988 to 1993.  Was The Voyager another one?  I think it was Bob who found the famous artifact in that one.  I had an intermediate story ("Salvage Party") planned to bridge the gap from story two to three.  But it was always just the one character, alone on a ship, going places.  I wonder how it could be expanded into a bigger set of locations of interest, places with histories of their own.

The Tenisin Willow stories were mysteries set in a fantasy world: The Body in the Field, Looking Behind a Feud and The Spirit Collector.  These ran 5k to 9k each and had a lot of potential, though the world slipped a lot from the first to the third story.  In the third, I was an inch away from saying the main character landed in a spaceship.  But why go there?  What if these could take place in that huge game world of mine (World of Aarn), the world of archipelagos with different magic/tech levels in each region ... yeah, yet another thing I never finished writing up; I just kept flip-flopping on which game system was worth supporting (Fudge? Microlite20?, argh!).

It feels like the things I could write these days are realistic sci-fi or just roll with some worldbuilding and do fantasy tales, not believing in any of the hocus pocus, but that's what sells.  All we've got these days are copies of copies of copies (10 to 50 levels deep) of worlds and myths and ideas, all filtered through decades of TV shows.  I guess if I write something, I just have to focus on completing the task and not caring about the pointlessness of it all, the absolute drowning ocean of the internet or whether anything will ever bring in a dime.

I have been thinking of a new series based inside a game world, but can those have sufficient motivation or actual jeopardy to be of interest to anyone?  Or is it just going to sound like a bunch of kids gathering "stuff" for "some reason"?

A week on my own?

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.  So I finished re-reading the Chronicles of Amber 1-5, always very inspiring.  Funny, I got the Kindle version of book 1, and at the end of that I went ahead and clicked the button to get book 2 on my gadget ($5.99) again, then book 3.  THEN remembered that I had that box marked RZ in my closet that had almost every book he ever wrote, so I read the last two books in my old SF Book Club edition with the Boris art on the cover.

I also went through my book of songs.  I printed fresh copies of a few, moved some from my main playbook to my "not quite" playbook.  I tried to remember songs I used to play all the time that were never in the book, and finally printed copies of "Three Marlenas" and "Times Like These".  Redid my arrangement of "Drive" (it's Capo 2), watched Ric Ocasek play it on acoustic, so the part that used to sound a bit off is now fixed.  Looked for any other song from The Cars that could be played (and grabbed their Greatest Hits) but wow, they are a tight bunch where each song takes the whole band to fill in the spaces.  Then I made a "Top 10" tabbed section at the front which are the ones I am most comfortable with.  It doesn't have to be exactly 10, but those are the ones I am most likely to nail.  Which reminds me, I never printed up either of those old Neil Young tunes.  It's never-ending.

I went over to check on the cats and scanend two of my old spiral notebooks from 2007-10, 49 scans each.  The pages range from poems & journals & doodles to page after page of game ideas that never went anywhere (probably because I couldn't find them later on).  So now I have those files, and can copy all pages with game ideas into my games folder, all pages with other things into those folders, and I'm pretty sure there are some poems in there that were never typed up.  I always did mark them with a checkbox and sequence number when I put them on the computer, but some were unmarked.

Sunday around 5AM, Sammy the cat walked across me as usual to tell me to get up and add food to the dish, and I had fragments in my head, so I turned on the little desk lamp and wrote two new half-page poems on completely different topics.  And I wrote one more on the back of a long receipt at a parking lot by the German deli on the hill around 7PM.  I need a new little notebook for catching notes, but they never work out quite right.  A full-page notebook is too big and conspicuous.  The little ones that fit in a pocket are okay but they get squished over time and have almost no space per page.  I prefer just quarter-folded sheets of blank paper that I can scribble on.  But then they sit around in awkwardly semi-folded piles.

I took another two boxes from the shed out on the useless "patio" and went through them.  I expected those to all have water damage from the years of neglect.  The top one had all the boxes for software I worked on back in the day, with a few I had forgotten about.  The next had mostly books with minor damage topped by an old Rush t-shirt which had been massively eaten/ripped/wrecked by some kind of small animal, yuck.  Almost all of those will be trashed, and anything left in acceptable condition will be donated.

Featured poet at Illumen = me

After some years away in a limbo dimension, I am back in print again. I am the featured poet in this month's Illumen magazine.

I still get that kick from opening up a zine and seeing which of my long-time friends and associates are in there with me.  

There was a pleasant "full circle" moment when I was able to give a signed copy to Jackson Patrick at one of his shows, because, after all, those poems were written on little scraps of paper while he was playing shows the year before.  The atmosphere of live music and people doing people-stuff gets me over the line to where the words come out again.