"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.

Some sales in the 2020s

Yesterday, a story I wrote with Denise Dumars went live on the Simultaneous Times podcast over at Space Cowboy Books.  You can listen to "Another Boiling Day" here.

It was fun listening to the advance "demo" version Jean-Paul sent.  I was impressed with his style of reading and the odd mix of jazzy music that helped give the impression of an eternally broken world we were trying to convey.  He nailed it.  I had a very different production in my head, but it wasn't about trying to make my production happen.  It was teamwork.  We sent the words and he made it work. 

Other recent sales:

4 poems and featured poer in the Winter 2022 issue of Illumen*
3 poems in the Winter 2023 issue of Illumen
sold a haiku to Scifaikuest for the Aug 2025 print issue

Jun 18 update: my poem "Lucy and the Elements" will be in a 2024 issue of Star*Line

Jun 22 update: my story "The Chicken Dilemmas" accepted for Flash Digest #4 (Jan 2025)

* This led to the interesting "full circle" moment when I saw Jackson Patrick at one of his shows in Carlsbad and gave him a signed copy.  Why "full circle"?  Well, the poems were written while he was performing the year before.  I would go out to a lot of shows with some blank pages folded in quarters, and capture strange melds of music and scenery and bits from my sci-fi brain.  One or two of the works were probably captured at the very same venue.  So there's story around those poems.

A few other submissions are in the works, but I have found it rather confusing trying to get back in the swing of things.  The markets seem very mixed, with strange requirements and short reading periods, and the constant threat where, if you don't follow every rule, they will just delete email and you will never know what happened to the work you sent.

I am working through it.

Vanishing Act 2013-2019

I have been trying to tune up and revitalize this blog and make it my main outlet for "creative life" postings.  Sure, I also find weird science and anti-pseudoscience bits here and there, so there will be some randomness.  But theis huge gap still should be explained ...

Things got very chaotic after my Mom died (2007) and Dad died (2010).  My marriage went down in flames, so by Sep 2013 I gave up the house and was on my own in a new apartment.  

But you know what, the new start was really invigorating.  I heard that there was live music, and there was nobody in my face telling me I can't go, so for the next year or two, I was out seeing live music 3 or 4 nights a week.  For a while, there was an unofficial fan group who showed up together as much as possible, where Shelly Hess would take photos of the events and I would post reviews. 

I started getting out and trying to play music myself.  There was nobody in my face telling me I can't go.  I even got a new acoustic guitar.  There was a long-running gag where, at first, the guitar had no name, then I officially named it "Shelly Says I Should Give You a Name", then I just gave it and called it "Shelley."  After the classic poet, of course.

On March 18, the divorce was final.  The very next night I played a few songs live at Rebecca's in North Park with Donna Larsen.

I met a great group of local local performers, not just San Diego area, where every show is an hour round trip.  These are the guys who are always just a few miles up the road.  For a while, Jackson Patrick ran an open mic at the Cambridge Inn in Vista, CA every Monday.  And I was always there, playing new songs.  I was so out of practice, so rusty, but he gave me a shot and I did my best.  My guitar playing was always fine, it was just my voice that never felt right, and eye problems and anxiety problems, but it was a great opportunity.  

We had a gig there the night Robin Williams died, which was a unique experience about exactly how performers function in society.  We did our best to be extra light and welcoming that night.  I learned so much from Jackson, and still see him whenever I can get away.  When Jack Bruce died, we did a set where I played the bass part for "Sunshine of Your Love".  On a memorial day, I played "Maggie's Farm" at the Poway Library, thanks to Ross Moore for setting it up.

I still did some writing, with a routine of bringing scrap paper to most of these shows, and writing poetry while the music and action was happening.  It was funny how things blur together in that environment, and the lady in red or the bright light beyond the window would turn into elements of sci-fi and fantasy pieces.  I just didn't submit them anywhere or do anything related to a writing career because I was doing music during those years.

I also spent a lot of time dating.  I had relationships that lasted 3 days, 3 weeks, 3 months, 3 years, then 3 months, then nothing for a while.  Then when I was giving up I met Anne, who is the best companion and adventurer.  Then COVID hit.  We got through and still do everything together.

All these relationships really showed what a difference it makes if your significant other supports what you do or not.  The 3 week lady was a local jazz singer, we even sang a set at the Cambridge one night, then we had to go separate ways.  The 3 month lady was 50 miles away and jealous of everything, always accusing me of sneaking around during the week ... so, that had to stop, and only seeing someone on the weekends was no good.  The 3 year lady thought that if I had time to do gaming or writing or music, I must not be working hard enough at my "real job".  Damn.

But Anne lets me be me.  So, I was able to come back and start trying to be creative again.

I know you're not supposed to let people get to you, but really, I spent my whole life with nobody supporting what I do, or even interested in it, or directly opposed to it.  And I did as much as I could in the hours available, usually after 10pm when there was nobody to say no.  

I also fell into the rut of sitting on my ass watching YouTube.  There is so much great content these days, but really, you have to be in control.  I am trying to get back to where the hours after 9pm are for creative projects, whatever they may turn out to be.