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. 

Voice of the Dead Reunion

I have been a writing slump lately.  I can't think of any fiction worth writing as the world is coming unglued and people are losing the ability to tell fact from fiction, and AI is wrecking every form of creativity, and everybody wants to be an "influencer" (God I hate that word) whether they know shit about anything or not.

I never heard back from the anthology at the museum in town.  We went to another art show event and I asked someone who seemed to be in charge, and she just dismissed me like I was just some dum-dum who had no idea how publishing works.  Yeah, I'm coming up on my 40th anniversary of my first published works.  I don't see anything wrong with asking if anyone knew where the zine was at.

And we never heard back from the big story/poem collection we put together and delivered at the end of the year.

But there was one big highlight this weekend.  It was a zoom call for the 20th anniversary of one of the short films I wrote way-back-when.  It was Voice of the Dead, produced by Cohen Phillips and his whole family.  One of my favorite film projects, even though it was shot in Missouri and I was in San Diego.  We had such a good rapport and such good communication that I really felt like I was there.  It was so nice to see some of the cast and crew again.  Who knew that two of the ghost characters I made up would get married in real life?  Good times.

Oddly, the version of the script in my "scripts" folder was just the first two pages.  I have no idea why the full script isn't in my archive.

I will try to gather a few more pieces and get this post updated soon.

 

 

2024 End of Year update

In early December (12/7) there was an event in downtown Escondido for the unveiling of a new mural.  We like to go to those just to see the arts in action, and we always enjoy murals and outdoor art.

It was a great mural with a hummingbird theme by Brenda Townsend.  I wrote three haiku based on the art and handed it to her as a gift.   I have done that before at art shows, it's a quirk of mine.  I like the challenge.  It's called ekphrastic writing, starting with an image and being inspired to find words.  She later got back to me and was very appreciative.

It turns out that the whole Arts Council was at that event so I got to hear about s lot of other events.

The next weekend there was an art show where pets were specifically invited to write about the art.   We only had about an hour since we were trying to get to an Eve Selis concert directors by 6:30.  But the place was packed,  I wrote six pieces in a tiny notebook,  meet some nice people,  and hit the highway.

I later found the address to submit these pieces to the annual anthology and got 3 submitted.  The others were not about specific artworks on display.

Beyond that, Terrie Leigh Relf and i finished the collection we've been working on since August and got it submitted to the publisher on 12-31.  Hit the deadline that was in my head the whole time.