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.

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.

New year, 4 new poems coming

I start the year with 4 poems in the current issue of Illumen magazine.

Took two days off and we're relaxing at a hotel in the coast. We went to Moonlight Beach in Encinitas and the beach was gone. Every place we tried to go was either not open that day or had weird half-day hours and we missed them. But its nice to get away. 

We have been doing a lot of boardgaming, the whole cycle from thrifting and finding the games, to testing them out and keeping the ones we liked the best, while giving others away.  So most of my writing in this period was my ScottVee Gaming blog, which has over 200 posts.  Check it out over here.

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.

Spinning the wheels, new commute

I was asked recently if I have been doing any writing lately. Fiction and poetry, not really. My brain is just blank from world events and how fact itself seems like fiction. But I have been doing short articles on a few topics: Gaming and Word History which had a crossover tonight on the subject of word games. I try to remember to play songs when I can. And I started a new job. Have not had an actual commute since 2004 so it is now bedtime. Cheers. 

2024 Update: this was after working as an independent contractor since 1996.  And since I felt crappy and stressed for part of every day, I had no real reason to think I could even handle the stress of a full-time job under fluorescent lights.  But it has worked out okay.  I just passed my 3rd anniversary at the job.  The big factor that makes it bearable is that everyone on the team is nice, and we're shielded from much of the chaos of every department trying to get their projects done first.

Also, that gaming blog has almost reached 300 posts.  That (and writing descriptions for thousands of stamp lots on HipStamp) has been my main creative output.  The Word blog fizzled.

Rush & Chris Squier - July/Aug 2015

Off to Rush concert. Will be back in the wee hours.
Jul 30, 2015 2:18:29pm

2024 Note: My brother Jon took me to the Rush concert up in Irvine (roughly), and we has seating on the grass with a fine view of the stage.  Some people were talking about how Chris Squire from Yes had recently died.  Between Geddy and Chris, two of the most inspiring bass players in history.

Not sure how I missed that one of my all-time favorite musicians died a month ago. Big tribute page with soundtrack. http://yesworld.com/2015/06/chris-squire/
Jul 31, 2015 12:26:29pm

Hmm. I hadn't thought of it being their last tour ever. Wow. Nice interview here. Http://www.spin.com/2015/07/alex-lifeson-rush-interview/
Aug 02, 2015 11:56:35am

And some random advice ... one about art going over the top, and one about our dreams to quit those day jobs and do our own thing.

Ever try making things out of pipe cleaners? Well ... dang. http://chenillestems.blogspot.com/
Aug 03, 2015 1:16:17am

http://www.theonion.com/article/health-experts-recommend-standing-up-at-desk-leavi-37957
I know I've shared this before, but ... this is good advice anyway.
Updated Aug 03, 2015 6:10:58pm

Updates - Aug 2014

Distilled from facebook posts:

Music report. Fun jam night. Started off fighting the day's sad news, but we went out of our way to be festive. Jackson Patrick did a few, then a nice surprise when two of the Duggans (Jimmy? and Don) did a set, then Jesus came in on his night off so it was a Jackson & Jesus show, I did my thing, then Norm, Jackson & Trish, my 2nd set, ending with Jackson & Jesus again ... specifically ending with their sweet jam of "Redemption Song." Lots of good humor. With new strings on guitar, I think my voice was the best it has been, so a good night. My new tunes were "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright", "Homeward Bound" (not as good as it was at home), and just a last-minute cheer up silly gag song: "Breakfast in America" (not really tring to capture the voice, just something happy for people to sing along with), probably redeemed "Skateaway" which was all out of whack last week. Nice that Alan Hart came out; got to talk with Nora, Don, Trish, Dave, someone, someone and a sprig of rosemary. Good to have a place where everyone knows your name (hey that's catchy). AND we invented a new drink called "Godzilla" (originally the girls were laughing and calling it an "Adios Tokyo" so I leaned over and gave it the proper name). And yes I will learn the song. You know, for a few hours I had no headache, no anxiety, no dizziness, just felt good. You guys rock.
Aug 11, 2014 11:58:19pm

Things done today: promo photo for a fellow musician, wrote 4 "mock advertisement" scripts for a travel site contest, got to page 100 in a first novel I'm reading & doing analysis of, wrote a haiku (poem #174 for 2014), progress report for work, ebay lots, mail, practiced music, dealt with today's sad news through denial and minor chords, performed music, night out with friends, and see that once again the cats have more food in the house than I do. Not bad for a sleep-deprived one-eyed jack with serious aches.
Aug 12, 2014 12:35:04am

Just received some contributors copies in the mail. Love PRINTED things that you can actually feel. So, I had 3 poems in Trysts of Fate magazine -- thanks, Lee Ann (editor AND cover artist, nice one!) -- Lisa Hayle would appreciate the irony that these were paranormal romance (gone horribly wrong). All three were written one night while listening to Jackson Patrick play music at a place in Carlsbad. Also a short short story about a bus from another dimension in Drabble Harvest #2, Terrie Leigh Relf, editor. Is everyone on facebook these days or what?
Aug 15, 2014 1:59:48pm

Earliest Memory: Bar Harbor

This was from another writing prompt on HitRecord.org:

My earliest memory is being in Bar Harbor, Maine on a family vacation.  I was about 6.  My Dad took me down the beach to a lighthouse and we looked inside.  I remember the big spiral stairs circling up into a glare of sunlight.  Still inspiring ...

In fact, I told that tiny tale at his funeral a few years ago.  It was almost impossibly hard to get those few simple words out.  I have no interest in religion, but it seemed perfectly symbolic, that circle of light.  And there was something brave about saying it, in that moment.

It's really hard to return to that place now.

Have you ever been on TV or in a Movie?

Here's a piece that just came spilling out when I was answering a question on HitRecord.org -- it ended up sounding like an interview, but it was just me following prompts.

1) Have you ever been on TV or in a Movie?

Not until I was 37, when I was cast as one of the core group of fighting sailors in "Master and Commander."  You know what?  Coming from a world of computer work, I actually suffered from culture shock because everyone around me was so darn ... nice.  Psyched.  Pumped.  I'd never seen that kind of camaraderie, that kind of problem solving, organization, or sheer madness.  Or worked so hard.  A film set (on a good day!) is the most exciting place I can picture working.  Even those odd days where I'm just trying to stop a wall from being torn down and have no idea whose mustache is in my hand and my headset keeps picking up air traffic and a polka station ... it does get surreal sometimes.   I just want to get back there again!  But I really don't want to be in front of the camera.  I'm big & weird-looking.  My gig was a sailor from 1802.  Now I still work on films, but only behind the scenes; writer, sound guy, you name it.  Still a great place to be, and no pressure to be pretty.  Not much money starting off, honestly.  After one P.A. job, long 15-hour days, I was told I could have made three times as much if I had mentioned that I'd done stand-in work before, and I said, "But I don't want to just STAND there, I want to do something!"  So, pay cut.  So many jobs, so many people needed!

2) If not, would you ever want to be on TV or in a Movie? Why? (be specific)

Until then I'd never even thought about it, I guess I bought into the stories that everyone in Hollywood is a jerk.  Seemed like there was some made-up barrier or mystique to try and keep regular folks away.  Or I was just a dope.  Before that I was a writer, and the written word is simple.  I never had that mad bravery that an actor needs.  And I was pretty sure nobody wanted to look at me.  But you need to realize that no matter what you look like, there's SOME role where you might fit in, SOME casting person who might see you and say, "Where have YOU been hiding?  You're just what we need today.".  So, until I tried it I said NO.  Not for me.  In my case, I was wrong and lost about 18 years of possible experience in the field.

#

The full piece is here, but this covers the main topic.

the Hardly Potter dream

Thank you brain.  It just dished up one of those dreams so perfect and strange and funny I woke up laughing.  Couldn't have come up with this stuff through any rational means ...

When Harry Potter first arrived at Hogwarts, he was given an entrance exam (which nobody else had to take).  Based on the results, he was sent to the not-so-famous school on the other side of the tracks, called Dumbledown's School.  Sign at the gate: "No owls allowed."  Among the administrators it was known as Dumbledown's School for Really Inconvenient People.  It was a series of really gothic  group homes with way too many towers.  Parts of the school were just unfinished graphics, and if the kids wandered in there, they would have to go home and wash the pixel dust from their hair.

During the limited school hours, the kids learned how to make Pop-Tarts and Spaghetti-O's, how to unfreeze ice cubes by smashing them with a hammer, and how to remove a dozen types of arcane stains from piles of laundry.

For most of the day they worked out in a peat pog, cutting up little slices of fuel for the big furnace downstairs.  If they found any bog people buried in the muck, there was a brief ceremony, and the body was sent to the school medical examiner, who was (of course), Quincy M.E. in a deep purple robe with sparkly bits on the cuffs.  Sadly, every case turned out to be a ritual strangulation, so Quincy was writing a treatise on decipher the ancient tattoos.

Instead of quidditch, each group home had a team of sorts, and they get together to toss cow pies.  Harry could catch a 40-yard whoozie like the best of them.  But being the best of "them" was never good enough for Harry.

One day, while Harry was out in the peat bog, complaining, Hagred came riding along doing whatever the heck Hagred does out in the woods.  He fell off the wagon and crushed Harry flat.    Harry was such a pancake, literally two-dimensional, they had to take him to Hogwarts to pump some 3d juice into him.  And that's how they found out about the "clerical error".

So that's how Harry really got into the famous school for wizards.  Snape claimed to know nothing about this, but was unusually prone to fits of dark laughter.

I don't know which faulty neurons fed me this one, but it made my day.

Meteor mayhem

Here's an unlikely scenario ... a small asteroid (about 45 meters across) passes a mere 17,000 miles (28,000 km) from Earth.  That's close in galactic terms, but it's still, you know, 17,000 miles away.  What makes last Friday special was that a few hours before that closest approach, this happened: one of the brightest meteor strikes on Earth in the past century.

What's fun about this is that there's no reason to think the two events are related.  All accounts have the meteor coming in from the opposite direction.  Of course, folks online spent days trying to twist things around to force a connection.

Maybe that meteor was orbiting the asteroid?  No.  That tiny roid probably couldn't hold a tennis ball in orbit at a few hundred miles.

Maybe that meteor broke off from the asteroid a gazillion years ago and is part of the same stream of debris?  No.  Moving the other way?

Maybe observers got the directions wrong?  Sure, start doubting the obvious.  Each object had a very clear direction, no error about it.

Yeah, but maybe there's a conspiracy to keep us from feeling threatened?  To get here, we have to doubt the obvious, make stuff up, and fall off a diving board.  Stop it.

Two things CAN happen without there being any connection.  Heck, the other day I had two big ebay orders, one from a guy name Xiang and one named Zhang, thousands of miles apart.  Aside from finding it odd, there's no sensible point to make about it.  In this case, think about it ... it's not like space rocks check their calendars: "Is there anyone else crashing into Earth today? No?  Okay, here I come!"

We can keep making wider and wider generalizations -- but both objects came from the Solar System! -- until we end up not saying anything at all.  Just record the events, learn what we can and move on.  Tons of debris enter the Earth's atmosphere every day.  Poof, fizzle, pop.  No big deal.  Some days are just a lot more strange.

Me & My Obscurity

"I guess I've been letting things get obscure around here.  Time to go on a fact-checking expedition."

One funny thing about journaling -- aside from its inherent pretentiousness -- is trying to explain any long gaps in time.  The above quote was one of my favorite wordings of this recurring excuse, covering a 6-month span where nothing was written, back in '99.  It went on to do a survey of jobs, people I knew at the time.  I'm not sure why any of that matters.

But sometimes, those old journal entries just crack me up.  Here's one from 9 Oct 1999, in the middle of a long boring bit about my current programming hell:

"about two weeks ago, there was a guy at the street fair selling freeze-dried lizards.  we bought a bunch, thinking the cats would find them amusing.  as soon as i ripped open the baggies, the things swelled up and came back to life, bigger than ferrets and much more stinky.  the things in this paragraph did not actually happen.  it's just that line of reality again, ever devious.  i've toyed with the idea of marking the dream blocks, maybe with a "d:", but i'm not a friggin hard drive.  and i know what was real.  why spoil the fun?"

Odds are, those journals (over 2,000 pages) were written to entertain my future self, but more and more they're also good for sorting out faulty memories.  Lately I've been harvesting them for writing prompts.  I may have to write the Day of the Freeze-Dried Lizards now!

The Chessboard of Life

The Chessboard of Life
by s.c.virtes
---
             
Alternations: back forth oblique,
day night right wrong
jumping one to the next --

Pawns to kings in
stacked series cover the space,
no variation to the schemes:
32 days and 32 nights
hide on the 8x8 square.

Then there may be a winner
or at least a paycheck
and the game begins anew.
#

p#49, written 08/05/1986, published in Sidewalk's End (May 01)

Computer unspeak

In most cases, the phrase "computer speak" (sometimes as a single word) means technical jargon related to computers.  But as more websites use databases to generate their content, we're getting to the point where computers are trying to speak to us, and we see just how dumb they can be.

Here's a classic piece of computer-interpreted data:
"Burclover is not viable as a Christmas Tree."
or ...
"In the wintertime, Burclover has a Porous foliage porosity."

These came from TheGrowSpot, which is actually a good site.  But they could do without the huge clumsy paragraphs trying to describe their otherwise well-organized data in sentences.

Meanwhile, scammers have nearly invented their own worthless language to try and fool us into responding to their crap.  I just got a spam email titled: "Dynamite instead of wiener."  How's that supposed to work?  You have sex and the whole house explodes.  Unnatural deselection ... shades of porous porosity ... hell in a handbasket?