40th Anniversary Month but David is Gone

  

This month is the 40th anniversary of my first published story: "The Twist" in Not One of Us #1 (9/86), my first zine project (Sycophant #1, Sep 1986) and first published illustrations in that zine.  This would soon be followed by my first published poem ("Drowning" in Dreams & Nightmares #9, 10/86).

I was originally planning some kind of a party or gathering ... or even ... anything?  We're so disconnected.  The party Anne put together for my 60th birthday went so well, I felt like I could do things again.  But we are so far apart and ...

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.

The SFPA has a fine memorial for him.

Yes, he was the man who published my first few poems.

Meanwhile ... Terrie is very ill, and it doesn't look like our second collaborative book project is going to happen.  I should try harder to stay in touch, but calling to see if she's still there is odd, and the weeks just fly by, all my energy drained by work and life, a heat wave, and what sounds like the crumbling of society.  But those are very private things, in and around a big death in the family on Anne's side.

So, I got started in print 40 years ago.  Although the small press credits have piled up, and I have had a few pro sales, it doesn't feel like it amounted to anything.  I won't stop creating my odd little things when I get the urge, but what felt like a big upcoming milestone turned out to be ... three little dots at the end of a sentence.

Creative Updates & a First Game

It 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.  So, my writer brain stays occupied.

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.

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.

Poems, Posts and Prostrations

In the last half of November, I did manage to get some writing done.  It comes after my full-time job and two side gigs ... at the end of all that, I do get some time to try to be creative.

I wrote a few pages of poems in a tiny notebook at the E.R. while Anne was passed out from what turned out to b electrolyte issues (??).  

I think I added 8 more entries to my Gaming blog, 4 more to my WordFixx blog, and 8 to my Stamps blog.

Today we went down to Ocean Beach to hang out at the coffee shop with a collaborator and work on our upcoming collections some more.  We swapped a new story in, and I found a photo of the two of us from a poetry reading 18 years ago, which fit just fine.

We started on a new piece, where we start with a sentence and each add a few lines, trying to leave the other writer with a difficult hook to work out.  Those are fun.  The story took some really odd turns.  When I got home, I gave it a tune-up so it sounds like we meant to end up where we did.  And I had to do some research into the actual layouts of morgues and mortuaries, so we could make the setting feel more real than some generic thing we saw on a TV show.

We would like to get that collection done and submitted by the end of the year.  We hit the 30,000 word mark, chock full of fiction, flash fiction and poems, with about 15 of my own weird illustrations.  

I have not had time to send out any submissions in a while.  If it's not one thing, it's another.

This all came out to about 35-40 pages of new material.

I threw "prostrations" in the title, because that word has been coming up as we watch the last season of Stargate SG-1 (where they are fighting the obnoxious Ori), and several times Anne said it sounds like such a strange word.  While it can be a religious expression (giving completely in to a higher power), I can now point out that when she was in the E.R. she was prostrated (rendered helpless with exhaustion or a similar condition).  We have both been exhausted, but every weekend when we try to relax we end up running errands, doing chores, working the side gigs and just not resting.

Posted on DriveThruFiction

I must have purchased over 100 items from DriveThruRPG over the years.  They're one of the largest markets of PDF and print and print-on-demand gaming books.  More and more works have become available from the 80s and 90s from classic game systems.  So I have whole folders of RPG reference material from them, and recently bought a huge bundle that ended up being about 50 PDF books for Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition.  Wow.  It's never-ending.

They always seemed like a very active market, with a lot of free preview editions and Pay What You Want items.  I have known for years that they had a sister site for fiction: DriveThruFiction.  I'm just not sure why I never thought to list any of my own items there.

This weekend I set up three of my existing poetry chapbooks.  They were already in PDF format, so there wasn't much work to do.  Their forms were fairly simple.  There was an interesting part where (if your documents is a PDF) you can choose a page range to make an automatic preview document.  So if I wanted to showcase page 6 to 9 as my free preview, just enter 6 and 9.  You could upload a cover and some other graphics, then upload the main document and click "Make Public."  You get a message saying to allow up to 3 days for the submission to be approved.  That's reasonable.  I like that content is approved by someone before appearing on the marketplace.

It turns out, all three were approved by noon the next day, and that was a sunday.  So here they are:

I will be adding more documents, probably newer editions of past books and chapbooks.  My author page is here.

I don't know if this will be worth the time.  For most sites with tons of content, you always feel like just another fish in the ocean.  If a site has a half million items and only 10 of them are yours, you are just a tiny percentage.  And these are just Pay What You Want with recommended $2 each. They are just 27-30 page booklets -- old poetry chaps won't be popular, but I thought their poetry collection could use a little more weird.  ;-).  Still, most of my creative output has been for pizza money, so maybe this can earn a salad somewhere down the line.

I tried doing some research, and you can always find videos and blogs talking about how every attempt to promote work is always a waste of time.  Or similar content saying how wonderful it is, and how this one person makes thousands of $$ a month.  What's real and what isn't?

You never know unless you try, and it's another platform where I am now visible in some form.  I will try to report in future posts about how it works out. 

I realize that most of the content on these sites was submitted by publishers, or at least very small companies.  I can't see going through the trouble of establishing yet another business name.  I'm just an author offering my own works.  All of the rights reverted back to me at some point, and I should be able to use them as I see fit.

The 2024 Novel Writing Tools Bundle

I am a sucker for online bundle deals.  They are such a modern, fun way to get a lot of content at a good price -- some of them are even "pay what you want".  Some of they send a percent to a charity: in this case you have the option to donate to the Neil Peart Brain Cancer Research Fund.  Here is a bundle that I heard about from Kevin J. Anderson, and he would know, since he is the curator.

This is The 2024 Novel Writing Tools Bundle, and you can find it here until Nov 30.  My little screen grab does not show all the book included, but I wanted to highlight the one by KJA called "On Being a Dictator."

I have always admired his ability to be out hiking at some amazing location and dictate chapters of his books into some device.  I have tried it a few times, but hearing my own voice makes me self-conscious around people, or immediately knocks me out of story mode.  Or both.  I just can't get enough separation to make it work, so that's the book I wanted most, and I hope some of the others can help me feel relevant or productive again.

I just wanted to pass this along.  A good little library put together by a good guy for a good cause.  Worth sharing.

Another Sale or Two, new Poems and new Blanks

I sold another poem to Dreams & Nightmares last week and have a flash fiction coming out in Flash Digest (Jan 2025).  I really need to get more submissions out there.

I brought some scrap paper to a winery in Escondido about 3 weeks back, where Astra Kelly was playing.  Look her up.  When there is live music playing, it helps disconnect me from day-to-day worries, and I can fill a few pages with poems and fragments.  So I got some new pieces done, none of them especially "genre", so I don't have any idea where to send them.  I don't know what's up with the vast percent of "literary" zines paying copies only.  I am not expecting a ton of $$, but zero is too low for me.

I have posted plenty of articles on my various blogs, so those are rolling along nicely.

Today we drove up to Ramona and did some thrifting before seeing Astra again at a different winery.  This time, the pages stayed blank.

I have ideas in my head.  Some new story settings.  Some old tales to dredge up and overhaul after 20-30 years of dust.  

I also want to get a few mini-collections into PDFs for DriveThruFiction.com.  I must have gathered over 200 titles from DriveThruRPG over the years, and you would think that the fiction cousin of that site would be a good match for me.  But you know how creative minds sabotage themselves -- I have had works on many sites over decades and failed to get a single actual sale, so when you get onto a site with hundreds of thousands of competing items, you expect to be just a drop in a bucket.  I can see myself spending hours getting this set up, only to get nothing out of it.

But it's still a bug in my ear this week.  Meant to do it, got hung up on other things.

That is the writing news for this week, such as it is...

Astra, Dresden, Big John, Elric and Other Old Friends

We were sick most of the last two weeks, but got back on our feet and went a few places this weekend.  

On Saturday we went to the Mia Marie Winery on Highland Valley Road, only three exits and four miles up the winding road from Anne's place.  Astra Kelly was playing, which was a treat since she had just moved to Arizona and I wasn't expecting to see her in town again.  Then again, I hadn't seen her play since before COVID, you know, before so many things broke down and don't feel as real anymore.

Some things I wanted to point out: she let's you know where she's going to be appearing and brings swag to her shows.  So many creative people have completely forgotten to send out newsletters.  I would get to more shows if to performers would give any kind of advance notice.  Half the time, I only know a show happened when someone posts about it on Facebook it after it's over.  And most musicians have given up on bringing actual items -- CDs, anything you can buy -- to help them out.  Honestly, a tip jar and a blurb about how you can find their stuff somewhere online (sometimes followed by mumbling about how the downloads don't pay shit) doesn't really cut it.  Astra brought her new release on vinyl, several past CDs at a reasonable price, some of her aromatherapy items, and other bits of projects I never knew about.  Apparently she is now the voice of a cat on Instagram.  That is how you do it.

One thing she had that I had never seen before was a "download card".  That was a little plastic card like the ones you get Google Play points on, except it has a URL and a code, and if you enter the code at the URL then poof, you get the download as promised.  As a pleasant bonus, she included both MP3 files and high-fi WAV files.  You can find her here.

(Nov 3 note: we saw her again today, this time in Ramona, and she had her whole shop with her again.  It was nice seeing people walk over and check out her things, and Kim at the wine counter was talking about how "crafty" she was.  If we don't let people know what we do, how will they ever know?)

That was inspiring for whenever I have an upcoming event.  I would rather bring too much than not have anything to show.

Now on Sunday, we went down to Balboa Ave to check out Book-Off, a big jam-packed bookstore where I found the first Dresden Files novel a few weeks back.  I didn't really plan on spending any money, but there was a gorgeous, like-new four volume set of all the Elric stories.  Michael Moorcock had always been inspiring to me, from his writing style and imagination to his works on Blue Oyster Cult albums.  I enjoy when someone can be creative across art forms and genres.  I root for underdogs and far-out creativity. This set was not cheap, but once in a while I see a definitive set of something, and feel like a collector again.  I had to have it.  Throw in a nice trade paperback Game of Thrones for $5.

Meanwhile, I got the new Jeff Vandermeer book "Absolution" from Barnes & Noble, and it dives right back into the crazy creepy Southern Reach world that started with "Annihilation".  I expect to ramble about that in the future.  Jeff and Ann Vandermeer have edited many magazines and projects, and I even submitted a story or two and I was never accepted, and they wouldn't know me from a bump on a log, but I can enjoy being a fan sometimes.  Anyway, I believe today was the official release date, so poof: mentioned.

As for the Dresden Files, I read book one (Storm Front) again, and it's such a quirky world, a real gem.  It is hard to make a supernatural setting that's even 10% different from all the rest, and these books have character to spare.  He does get beaten to a pulp more than he should be able to recover from, but that mix of crime noir and White Council shenanigans is classic.

We watched the whole series, and I have no complaint about it: I thought the cast did a fine job, and don't care that they had to shuffle the episodes or make monsters easier to film.  Paul Blackstone was top notch although blah blah he doesn't fit the exact description in the book.  He gets points for personality and holding together the mix of humanity and madness.  I've read pages and pages of gripes and production issues, but I enjoyed it back then, and just as much this time around.  My only complaint was that it ended after only 12 episodes. 

One of the monsters in the Storm Front episode, loosely built on that first book I had just read, replaced an ugly toad demon with ... big John DeSantis from Master and Commander.  Hey, I knew that guy.

John was an all-around nice guy every time I saw him on or off the set.  After M & C, it was always a treat to see him guest star in my favorite shows, from Supernatural (a golem) to Stargate (Jafaa warrior) to all the other places he showed up, and in 13 Ghosts, OMG he was terrifying.  It must be weird to only get the meanest, most evil roles when he just wanted to kick back and chat -- he definitely knows how to use his looks and voice.  I always wish him the best out there in show biz.

Here is a shot of John DeSantis and I from the Master & Commander wrap party 20-odd years ago.

Memory lane ...

So this has been an indirect tribute to the people we meet in this mad creative life.  They feel like friends when we see them at shows, or at conventions, or on the page or on the screen.  Maybe we never actually sat down over dinner, or went on road trips together, but "acquaintance" never felt sufficient.  As for the fictional characters, they fill niches in my mind in other ways.

BTW, all or most of the Dresden Files books are available as audiobooks read by James Marsters, who has a great voice to these.  I enjoy listening to them with Anne after hours.

I wrote 8 or 10 poems while Astra was singing, and I hope some of these things help to rip more works out of the depths and onto paper.

A Week On My Own again (again?)

My girlfriend was down in Puerto Vallarta this week, so I had so much free time to do my own thing.  Theoretically.  Aside from the days that were completely ruined by full-time job and commute.  So that left two hours on weeknights and then the weekend.

I was able to put together a new draft of the collaborative collection I have been working on, and get it emailed out.  This meant pulling out stories and poems that were not as well liked as the others, then putting in some new pieces of mine and splitting the whole thing into three logical (roughly genre delimited) sections to make it a bit more interesting.

The regular Thursday zoom call was a real treat.  Some of the new (to me) folks were there (JJ and others), but also two writer/publishers I have known for 20-30 years.  Between the host and those two, and I, we must have appeared together in 200 or more publications since the 80s.  We've all published each other's work when we working editorial roles.  So I'm afraid we took over, talking like old times, and the others slowly wandered off.

Yesterday, I drove down to Ocean Beach to work some more on that collection in person.  There was one piece that was a haibun in two sections -- each section a paragraph & ku, but we found that there was a time slip in there, and new in-between scenes were needed to tie it together in a tighter package.  So that was fun.  I was hoping to write several new pieces together, but a chunk of the limited time was taken up by computer issues and me having to loop 15 blocks back to my car because I forgot my darn reading glasses.  I could just barely read without them, but knew it would bring on a headache.  

So, it was a nice foggy day on the coast with some chill in the air.

Driving home, I had a head full of words.  And with certain instrumental pieces playing, I had half-formed poems where the words fit the rhythm of the song exactly.  But is that even a thing?

Back at Anne's place (totally quiet sanctuary, no cats or dog), I had to do my usual 2-3 hours each weekend of writing up descriptions for the stamps we sell online.  Anne does the scans, and there was a huge backlog to get to.  But since I am trying to keep my brain in writing mode, I ended up researching a few of those stamp issues, and adding four non-trivial blog posts about them:

Wendy Fitzwilliam (Miss Universe 1998)

Angola Classic Animals

An Industrial Nightmare from Saar

and

Selvage markings: Registration marks 

I have to admit that I work in bursts and after a big gap I will back-date the new stuff to make it look more natural.

And today, back in Escondido, it was mid-90s and sunny.  I got back to my place (2 cats but the dog is still in day care) and wrote up 4 blog entries for my games blog and started on this update to my Writer's Life blog.

I have no new sales to report.  No new submissions, really.  But I am still getting things done.  Collaboration work, a zoom call with other writers, and 9 blog posts, with other drafts in progress. 

The image is from our trip to OBCoffee: my pumpkin spice chai with a very Buddhist tree-of-life motif in the foam.

"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.