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.

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