A Journal of the Pandemic #29

Here we are at the end of 2021, and only a few months away from a full two years of the pandemic, and it's very, very safe to say that this is going to be a defining moment of recent history.

I'm not sure we've really gotten around to appreciating this fact.  I mean, yes, everyone knows it's happening.  Most of the discussion, though, long ago settled on the response, and not to the effect.  Nearly two years in, I just thought it would again be worth considering the latter.  In the run-up to Christmas a lot of chatter has been about the supply chain and how all those cargo ships bottlenecked out to sea.  That's just the tip of the iceberg!  We haven't even begun to appreciate what's happened during all of this, let alone what's going to continue happening as a result.  I do my shopping online every year because everyone on my list lives elsewhere.  It's just easier than buying it here and shipping it myself.  I've done that on occasion, sure.  I'm not averse to doing that.  But on the simple premise of online shopping, it was certainly recommended, if doing so, to do it early.  My older sister thought she had to do it so early I got her gifts...right after Thanksgiving.  I did my shopping at the end of last month.  That resulted in everything arriving well before Christmas, this year.  Last year there were a lot of real delays even with the same ordering pattern.  The difference, this time, was that I probably ordered a lot of things that were never going to be in those marooned containers.  I feel bad for those people.  

Companies are beginning to change the way they do business, what they're willing to spend money on versus the return they get from shoppers.  People like me, for instance, who are still buying physical media like DVDs/Blu-rays were in for a rude awakening this past Black Friday, since unlike all recent preceding years sales at traditional venues did not really feature those.  WWE just announced it's ceasing releasing material that way.  I know, I know, streaming is the thing.  I watch things on streaming.  I would not want to watch all the things on streaming.  I never even had cable.  I lived with cable, but never had it myself.  I certainly never had premium cable, and that's basically what everyone wants to provide, now, just so everyone can watch one service for one show.  I don't get that.  I mean, at the moment these services have crazy money to provide crazy material.  I mean, that's how we got the Snyder Cut, right?  It probably would never have happened otherwise.

One of the crazier things you may have noticed is the excuses people make because of the pandemic.  "Pandemic weight gain," for instance.  

Me, I can't believe it's still happening.  We got Omicron, now.  Omicron seems to have turned into a neutered version of COVID-19.  It's sort of the selling point for the booster shot, but even the booster shot isn't really selling very well, and no one is pushing it very hard, unlike the vaccines themselves.  At work the rash of illnesses have been traditional illnesses, lately.  And at work, because of the pandemic, what have traditionally been low attendance periods aren't looking that way in the two holiday weeks.  It looks like people are just trying to catch up with work.  That's what's going to be happening, and it's not going to look very pretty, in the months ahead.  

Me, at work I still have to wear a mask, but when I go out in public, even when it isn't called for, even though I'm vaccinated, I still wear a mask.  I'm really, really used to it at this point, and this seems especially weird, knowing I've been wearing a mask for so long.  I even reached the point, this week, of realizing that my mask was being mashed up with how long I'd let my beard grow, without me realizing it was the beard causing it, until I shaved it back down.  

I've been making tentative plans to visit family next year.  I really want to actually follow through, too, because I haven't seen family since 2019, and 2022 seems like it's going to finally be safe to do so without seeming selfish.  I mean, I know plenty of people who have been traveling since a long time ago in the pandemic era.  Across state lines, across the country.  

In the meantime, I'll just have to make do with what I've been doing.  I finally realized, this year, that even the pandemic funny money finally runs out, and I need to start being responsible again.  I was privileged to be in that position.  I say that again.  Now I just want money to be able to do the big things, like travel plans, even to be able to make a big move, like moving.  If I can figure out how to do that.  If there are other possibilities out there for me.  My job is the most fulfilling thing I have ever done for work, and yet it's an incredibly hard one to do with the certain knowledge that, like every other job I have ever had, there are others working alongside me who don't understand its responsibilities.  And that's every job.  That's people.  People, on the whole, are selfish.  You have to understand that. 

That's life.

Substack

In the world of comic books, one of the hottest topics in recent months has been all the major name creators who've decided to migrate their work to Substack.  So eventually, I got to thinking, maybe this is a venue I should consider.  This week I did more than consider.  I started Scouring Monk at Substack.

Now, longtime followers of my blogging know "Scouring Monk" isn't exactly a new title for me.  My first blog (which, sadly, is pretty much abandoned at this point), was of course also called Scouring Monk.  Most of the readers I've ever had in blogging read my work there.  I launched a thousand other blogs later, including this one, but it was for a long time what I most considered "home."  

So, barring any better ideas once I made a commitment to considering Substack, I named it Scouring Monk.

The only other problem was that I had no idea what this new thing was actually going to be.  The setup prompted an answer to this, and I spit out, "uh, fiction, and books, and film," which of course are among the primary things I've been doing as a blogger anyway.

And then I had to actually provide content, which comes in the form of an email newsletter.  The whole idea of Substack is that you collect a list of subscribers.  Successful Substack users can then consider the paid option, in which subscribers are given the option of paying for content.  Very successful Substack users can make considerable money out of this.  

Given my track record, I can only believe in my prospects in an optimistic manner.  So far I have sent out three newsletters.  Each begins with a new piece of short fiction, and then talk about a book I've read recently, and then a movie, which for the immediate future means movies released in 2021.  I only have the strength of my writing, as always, to go on.  

None of this means I will stop blogging, meanwhile.  This author blog is a separate thing.  I have a Star Trek blog, and a movie blog (the latter maintained sporadically), and a few others.  Only madmen attempt to read all of them, although now it's a lot easier to do so, on the off chance you would like to label yourself as a madman.  Although, honestly, few enough people are reading even this one these days, once I made that break with the Cavanaugh folk.  (Even Cavanaugh doesn't visit anymore!)

I know, I know, stop making the hard sell!

Anyway, hopefully I can continue to do stuff.  I made a concerted strong initial push, to help establish tone.  Can't say if that will be maintained.  Usually, these days, my best is once a week, depending on how motivated I'm feeling.  This is the longest post at this blog outside the pandemic journal I've done in a while.  Hurray!  

I will certainly let you know if things turn out very differently.

Kindle Vella adventures continue

 I just submitted the eleventh installment of Nine Panel Grid at Kindle Vella, which is the halfway point for the story.  Like Aronnax it isn't exactly blowing up in popularity (actually, like any of my works!), but at least with this one I would totally understand readers not at all understanding what it is that it's supposed to be accomplishing.  This one's very much something that appeals to my sensibilities.  I would have to be someone readers already care about in order to care about it, and that isn't part of this reality, so...!

The good news is I already have another Kindle Vella project lined up, and I think it will be an easier sell.  It's called Ex-Ray: Event Fatigue, and I'm going to try and be conventional with this one.  Really!  Try!  With me this is always a difficult proposition.  Once I sketch it out I will probably even be writing it simultaneously with Nine Panel, and it'll be a longer story.

As I wrote last time I checked in, I submitted Seven Thunders to an agent last weekend, and said agent somehow thought it was a great idea to get back to me on Thursday with a rejection notice.  So that was pretty cool.  Maybe they were having a really bad Thanksgiving, apparently having to work an' all, I don't know.  It may have contributed to how yesterday began playing out for me, but realistically, everyone who participates in this game struggles to get in, and since I have been playing so poorly it doesn't really surprise me to still be on the bench, but I'm determined not to give up.  I'm gonna persist.  

I did just send out Christmas presents, including this year's collection, Gracie, which I would like to believe is another opportunity to at least convince my family I'm worth rooting for, but who knows?  I had fun writing it, anyway.

Putting It Out There (Again)

This isn't much of a post except as a note that I'm putting Seven Thunders out there again.  I submitted it to a publisher last week and to an agent earlier this afternoon.  It's the effort of trying, to keep trying, that I'm pursuing this time.  I've been sitting on this manuscript for close to a decade at this point.  I've made sporadic efforts over the years in getting it published, and I guess I've got renewed determination to make something happen.  I'm actually more interested in pursuing the agent angle, something I've never really done before, even though of course the major publishers certainly prefer that.  I was reading a book about one of the major editors of the pulp magazine era who specialized in mobilizing the science fiction scene, and it got me thinking, not so much about submitting stories to the journals out there (I was never that motivated in that avenue), but the thought that I have this material that I think has potential to be something, and so many other stories just waiting to be written, and I might never actually write them unless I get this one in print.  

Well, stranger things have certainly happened.

A Journal of the Pandemic #28

 So, got some interesting news yesterday.

At work we've had our fair share of employees who've come down with COVID-19 since March 2020.  Until yesterday I had never had someone working in the same room as me get it.  Yeah.  So.

I'm already on vacation.  I was actually asked to consider coming in the rest of the week to help out while my coworker's out.  I have no interest in doing that.  I'm very content with how I'm spending this time, thank you, and how I intend the rest of the week to play out.  I'm feeling fine, by the way.  

How this is playing out is very interesting.  Yeah, we've been dealing with this pandemic for very close to two years now.  When the Delta variant hit, we came very close to dealing with it as we had at the height of the response last year.  Close, but in my experience, not that close.  As much as some people want to be extra cautious, things are slowly returning to normal.  I mean, other than the giant backlog of materials floating off the coast of California.  (Which, again, for those keeping score, is kind of ironic, as my first awareness of COVID-19 was the cruise ships held in quarantine off the coast of China.)  

The government passed a mandate, just before my previous vacation, for all federal employees to be vaccinated.  At work they just made that an official requirement of continued employment.  And, thanks again for asking, I am vaccinated, and would've been sooner if things had played out differently, but, and I don't know how it is for everyone, things have been progressing at a leisurely pace, the less the urgency of the whole thing has been felt.  

There are plenty of people who are still unvaccinated, and at this point we can probably assume it's people who have made deliberately decisions to be so, and this is beginning to be an issue.  Southwest Airlines just had a fairly dramatic showdown with the whole concept, at one point denying that a rash of flight cancellations had anything to do with it (it could also have been, I don't know, UFOs).  A lot of people have a lot to say about this sort of thing, but there is, surprisingly, a lot of different ways to view things, and even if I personally think a lot of it is stupid, it's still going to be that way, and there's no good reason to try and deny it from happening (that way lies tyranny).  So that's how things are.

I had no bad reaction to the shots, and anytime I've felt sick during this whole period, especially when I went to the effort of getting tested last December, I've had no doomsday effects.  Some people have been far less fortunate.  

The protocols keep changing.  Previously they would've shut down the room, at work, but they're either not going to or working slowly toward it.  So far they aren't, and the stated reason is that every member of the regular room staff has been vaccinated, and we still wear masks, as we have all day every day since returning to work in May 2020, and at this point that seems good enough.  (Except the one who contracted the virus.  They're out at least through Friday.  The previous standard was a two-week quarantine, or until they tested negative.)

There's a lot of people who want to remain as cautious as possible, but slowly, we're emerging from the various restraints.  Movies are routinely making $100 million and above at the US box office again.  We're not being bombarded with dire warnings about outbreaks, and for much of the year mass gatherings have been happening.  They recommend booster shots.  

I've begun wondering about life without masks again, but then, I'm at a library today where two days ago I wore one of my mustache masks for the first time, and the staff loved it.  These are certainly interesting times.  They won't be hard to remember.  

Nine Panel Grid, Gracie, World Famous...

 This week I'm on vacation, and I'm doing something somewhat insane.  I'm working on three different projects simultaneously.

One of them is Nine Panel Grid, my second Kindle Vella project.  (You can follow the progress here.  I've already posted the three chapters you can read for free, and submitted the next one a moment ago.)  This one's a strange beast that I'm tackling one chapter at a time to see how it might evolve.  It's a rare story where I heavily suspect I would have to do revisions once this draft is completed, if I hope for it to be anything more than it currently is.  At any rate it's very interesting to write.

I'm also tackling Gracie, the follow-up to George & Gracie, the title story and lead to my annual Christmas collection that'll be sent out to family.  Here we are in October.  The plan is to write a chapter every day through Sunday, and since I planned for seven chapters, if I manage to keep that up I'll have that part done by then.  (My dad actually asked about this year's Christmas poem yesterday!  He's never interested in my writing.  And this is the first time anyone's anticipated one of these at all, so that was doubly pleasant to hear.  I'll tackle the poem later, which is never very hard to write.)

I'm also having to play catch-up with World Famous, a project I've been working on all year, not a long story, but possibly the longest story I'll have written since I was writing novel manuscripts routinely a decade back.  Two more days and I'll be caught up, so don't worry.  It continually surprises me how easy this one's been to write (but then I'm once again returning to the well of each chapter being from a new perspective, which I've done a number of times at this point in my fiction), and today's was no exception.  It helped I got to put in some dialogue for a change.  I love crazy conversations.  But then, that's the kind you're likely to have with me in the real world, too.  I just have more to say when I'm writing, is all.

So I did all three today.  All I need to do is repeat that twice more.  I'm not sure how many chapters of Nine Panel Grid I want to do this week.  If I do three or four more (counting Thursday and Saturday, which is usually when I work on Kindle Vella chapters; Friday I'll be headed out to watch some movies, so I expect only to work on Gracie), fine.  This one's twenty-two chapters, so I'm not in a rush to finish it like I was Aronnax last vacation, not by any stretch.  I have no specific time-table for it.  Working on it at all this week is a bonus, especially given the other stories.

As of today it's a great way to spend a vacation.  When I was writing novel manuscripts I was either underemployed or not employed at all, or had time to kill under unusual circumstances.  Since I've been working full time at my current job, it's been tough to motivate myself to spend a lot of time writing (even though I desperately want to finally write Collider) (which I hope will happen next year), although I've certainly worked on a number of projects, put out a few story collections this year alone.  

Everyone at work asked me where I was going.  Well, to the library, to a land called Wendale, to right here in Tampa...

Nine Panel Grid begins

 Nine Panel Grid is my next Kindle Vella project.  It's kind of complicated.

As you might know from following my work in recent years, I've been doing a lot of comic book script writing.  Not because I've been hired by a comic book publisher or am getting the scripts illustrated, but to gain experience in doing the work.  Originally, Nine Panel Grid was going to be another one of those.

I kind of figured if Kindle Vella readers had any patience at all for my work, they probably were never going to indulge something like that.  So I developed a different approach.  This one follows three separate tracks on a fictional comic book issue: the story in the comics, the story of the art, and the history of the comic.  

Nine Panel Grid draws from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen and Jack Kirby's New Gods.  To this point I don't think there's been a ton of overlap between appreciation of the two, but it's what interested me.  The title of my story draws on Watchmen's style, nine panels in a grid format on a page.  In recent years Tom King has been using the format pretty heavily, so I figured it was well-known enough to use as a term and the title of a story.

Again, there will be no art.  The conceit of the whole thing requires the reader to imagine the art for themselves, so I had to at least visualize for myself what the art would look like, so I could write it up for the story.

I have no idea if there's even remotely an audience for this, let alone on Kindle Vella.  It interests me.  What can I say?

Aronnax, completed

I just finished writing the twelfth and final chapter Aronnax.

I’ve been working on this since the end of July, and for the first six chapters, it was one chapter a week. This week, I was on vacation, so starting on Tuesday, I wrote every day. They were never overly long chapters. The complete story is somewhere around 12k (actually 13,440, plus notes I intend to include in a future print edition) words, generously  considered a novelette, very generously a novella (I’ve published a whole string of novellas in the past five years, I should know). Not so long.

But I’m pretty happy with it.

As with a few other stories I’ve done over the years, each chapter is from a different perspective. Most of them deliberately cut off the narrative to keep the ending a secret, but the thrust of this one thing, Captain Nemo’s submarine the Nautilus, as a catalyst in disparate lives, remains at the heart of the story, I hope in effective ways. The idea, as with all the good stories, is to tell something about the human condition.

Hopefully something worthwhile.

The chapter will populate later today at Kindle Vella, and that’ll be that. I haven’t decided if I will tackle another project on the platform, a longer one (it wasn’t the original intention for Aronnax to be twelve chapters, but that ended up feeling like its natural shape), as apart from the story I’ve been writing once a month every month this year (I will have to play catch-up next weekend as I took up last month’s slot with Aronnax) I really haven’t told a full-length story in ages, and I have yet to find the courage to begin tackling Collider (maybe next month’s week-long vacation!). 

But it always feels nice to work on a story, and to finish it. With this one the original goal was to retell Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea without Nemo, or Nemo minimized, or Nemo contextualized. I think I accomplished that.

Aronnax (2.0)

 About a month ago, I was completing a project and attempting to publish it via Amazon's KDP when I hit the unexpected snag of Kindle needing to know who the translator was for the edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea I had transcribed from.  The idea of the project wasn't a complete transcription, although it had originally been intended to be a partial one, and the rest of the story completely rewritten or cherrypicked, as I had determined, when I read the book five years earlier, that I liked the parts without Captain Nemo best.

Well, I didn't know the translator, and Kindle didn't like that, so the book was left unpublished.  I had transcribed only to the point Pierre Aronnax and company discover the Nautilus, and as yet are unaware of its true nature, much less its chief occupant.  I'm not sure Jules Verne really nailed the shape of Nemo's role, but I loved the opening act as the mystery of the Nautilus unfolds, a kind of lost coda to the great age of maritime exploration last represented by Moby-Dick, so that's what I chose to feature in my version, and that alone.

Then I decided to tackle the idea from a different vantage point.  Kindle has recently launched Vella, a serialized storytelling venture, and that's one thing I can always make time for, so last week I launched a revised version that features entirely original writing, a parallel narrative recapping the Verne tale and a modern sequel in which a descendant of Aronnax, a deteriorating Nautilus resting in his backyard, decides to undertake one last adventure.

I don't know how often I'll be plugging away at this, maybe once a week or so, which is the pace, at two weeks, I have set, but you can keep up with the results here.  I also don't know how long it'll be, and I haven't attempted to prepare a full outline.  At times such things can feel like both blessing and curse, as I have discovered with other current projects.  I know the shape of it, thanks in part to half being drawn from existing material, as well as the probable conclusion to the original material.  

Should be interesting.

A Journal of the Pandemic #27

 You'd have to be living under a rock not to have heard of the Delta variant currently driving the pandemic era, and the increased push to get vaccinations widespread.

Things are definitively returning to normal.  The biggest complaints now are that jobs aren't being filled because people don't want to work, with the common explanation that they're getting too much money with unemployment benefits to bother with earning a paycheck.  Businesses are putting signs up explaining curtailed operations, offering huge signing bonuses...

Yeah, the pandemic is still happening.  At work, a slew of (vaccinated) coworkers have been wiped out recently, either because they actually caught COVID-19 or were exposed to those who did, and ended up taking time out either to get diagnosed or because it was confirmed. 

Combined with the hurricane that whipped through the region early in the month, I've been plagued by considerable uncertainty.  I had a project that ended up aborted because I ran into rights issues, but have since revamped it (and will talk more about that later), and others that I haven't been working on virtually at all, stuck in a holding pattern, and have struggled with feelings of inadequacy.  

On the other hand, the family front seems to be getting better, far better than it seemed at the start of the year, although now of course my dad is doubling down on his pandemic thoughts and even I am finding it hard to listen to it now.  But the calls continue, mostly every Sunday, and that means another tomorrow, regardless of how conversation flows.

I finally reconciled myself with all the pandemic spending I was doing, and am actively taking measures to be fiscally responsible again.  Strange to say, but for me that's how things played out.  I am well aware, again, how fortunate I've been in all this.  I'm grateful all over again that I had medical coverage two falls ago when I needed it for emergency optometrist visits, which I used again a few weeks ago, and have once again updated my contacts prescriptions after yet another emergency when one of the legs on my glasses inexplicably, randomly and suddenly broke off.  (I successfully glued it back on!  But have made the decision to switch back to regular contacts use, after depending on the glasses since I had those updated, two falls ago.)  

Life is strange; life continues.

Farewell to the Warrior

The exact timing of her passing is unclear. My sister and her family headed out late Thursday night and didn’t return home until late Sunday. They found her dead.

Boo showed up in my life in late 2004, and by the next year was already turning up in my fiction. I have this long series of stories that rewrite the same basic premise involving a boy and a dog. I inserted her into the second version, which can be found in Monorama, the collection I put out when I started this blog in 2012. And this way and that, she would leave a trail in my work just as surely as she shed copious amounts of her white fur.

The last time she appeared was actually last year’s George & Gracie, where she makes a random cameo, straddling the real and dream worlds.

She had been losing worrisome amounts of weight over the past year. The problem was curtailed once, but it resurfaced. She was indeed an old kitty, but when I last lived with her two years ago she was still doing quite well. She didn’t quite have her old spring, but she was very much herself. At that point she would regularly cuddle beside me. She was never really a lap kind of cat, but she always knew how to have her people time. Sometimes she would demand affection. I guess maybe that will be one of my happiest memories.

Well, pretty much all of my time with her. She was the best. She’ll always be with me, and she will always be greatly missed.

A Journal of the Pandemic #26

 So, about an hour ago now, I got my second shot.  

I would've gotten done with this slightly sooner, I really would have.  I admit I hesitated when the shot was being offered at work earlier this year, but by the time I had second thoughts, the machine had ground in other directions, and sort of left me behind.  So I finally took matters into my own hands, and got it done with CVS.

Things are very slowly returning to a sense of normal.  At least for me, my tiny corner of the world.  Even the neighborhood library is technically open again, although for some reason all its lounging chairs went missing, or something.  I'll try again soon to see where that situation's at, but this one's a big deal because it was one of the last things to hammer down the lockdowns last year, and it was the singular change to my pre-pandemic routines, altering the regular course of my weekend activities (yes, going to the library; a regular social animal I yam).

At the box office, A Quiet Place Part II was the first domestic release to cross the hundred million mark in the pandemic era.  Godzilla vs. Kong came within a tiny, tiny hair of doing it first, but having one film, let alone two, at or near that mark had been impossible to conceive until this summer.  The major releases that tested the waters before this point didn't even come close.

UPDATE: I guess they let Godzilla/Kong back in theaters to cross the finish line. I checked in with Box Office Mojo a moment ago. So officially two!

People technically don't need to wear masks all the time anymore.  At work, we do, because there are tiny babies ("tiny" apparently the word of the day), who aren't eligible for the vaccine, so we've got to maintain the status.  I kind of like wearing my collection of mustache masks.  I imagine it's become a signature.  Anyway.

Quietly floated the idea of resuming the possibility of a family reunion with the siblings, for next year, but no one picked up on it.  There will need a lot of planning, completely different from the negotiations that resulted in the one that was cancelled last year.  Part of this was made easier a few months ago, when my sister and her family transplanted to New Jersey, which is a reasonable car trip's distance from Maine, which they're demonstrating on Thursday, so our dad can finally meet his new grandson.

And life goes on.

Aronnax, Space Colony Bactria

Haven’t actually written about what I’ve been busy working on, so here’s a quick update:

Aronnax is an interesting project I’ve been meaning to do for some time, but only just gotten around to starting. It’s an edited version of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I think there’s a really interesting story in there, but it’s been buried for years under a lot of forgettable Nemo material. I know this sounds crazy, as Nemo is literally the reason anyone cares about the book. Well, what can I say? Sounds crazy. Probably is crazy. 

Space Colony Bactria is my latest comics scripting project. It’s an entirely original idea (…somewhat, ah, riffing in Star Wars), and so it’ll be the most ambitious one I’ve tackled yet, and longest. At the moment I’m plotting the whole thing out.

And as I’ve been doing for a quarter century, I’m still working toward writing Collider. In a few months I will probably have a different set of free time to play with. I’ve found it difficult to concentrate as I have when tackling book-length manuscripts in the past with the arrangement I have now.

Bizarro Kitty (Sally #4)

Every time I blog about Sally, she ends up doing the opposite of what I just wrote. So I won’t give further updates.

(Ha!)

She’s Bizarro Kitty. Bizarro, in Superman lore, has among his many quirks the speech pattern of always saying (as crudely as possible) the opposite of what he means.

Sally is Sally. She’s a stray cat and as such calls her own shots. She comes and goes as she pleases.

I just happen to love it when she’s around.

Listen, and I certainly don’t want to jinx it, but it’s just terrific how she avoided snagging a claw on a winning lottery ticket that ended up at my doorstep. That would’ve been awful!

Stray Has Gone (Sally #3)

Continuing this inadvertent, unplanned saga of the stray cat Sally, the next update again reverses the fortunes of the last entry:

Stray has gone.

(This is a riff on a Dave Matthews Band song, “Grace is Gone,” a title that was later a movie, too. The song comes from my favorite DMB album, Busted Stuff, which was once delayed because the record label didn’t think it was sufficiently commercial. It ends with the epic “Bartender,” my favorite DMB song. In my day job I have been bringing in CDs, a thing I still have and listen to, every morning, a wide variety that last week included opera. I opted out of bringing Busted Stuff this first round, but maybe it comes in next week. Also skipped over Bob Dylan!)

Anyway, parenthetical phrase (I used to do them randomly, and at length in the middle of sentences, such as I am doing right now!) aside, the sad truth is that Sally, the beloved stray, has indeed been straying.

I don’t know if it was the incursion of Hilary that caused it, or the alarming drilling that I heard at around the same time (did someone deliberately scare her away???), but she’s been scarce ever since. I wasn’t even spotting her at her other human feeding post until yesterday or so. I saw hide nor hair of her, which even when she was boycotting me due to dog contamination never happened (or at least for very long).

At this point I’m not going to assume anything. She’ll do what she wants to do. It’s kind of the whole point, right? 

She came back the next day, by the way. (Sally #2)

Yeah, she didn’t wait long. 

The funny thing is, this week another cat (Sally looks like she has black fur but she’s pretty dirty), who’s got dark black fur, who has never visited before, started following her up the steps. Sally hissed, but I’m not sure what’s continued to develop. As I’ve said, she likes food from humans but not necessarily humans themselves. She skitters away if I, cat gods forgive, attempt to pick a leaf off her. I put out the cup (or the tin) of gravy-loaded goodness (which is her preference, as I’ve learned the past few years) and then close the door again, leaving her to it.

If there’s unexpected commotion and she skitters away for other reasons, I always check later to see if she came back to finish. Usually she will. 

Or perhaps her horrible, horrible rival has, recently!

I don’t know the sex of the rival. I’m calling it Hilary, and another cat, who’s never visited but is always around, Ted. These are all names from the comic strip Sally Forth. (Very funny, highly underrated.)

(If the rival is a boy, it could be like Edmund Hillary, okay?)

Sally

 

This is Sally. Sally is a stray cat. Sally might have another name. As far as I’m concerned she’s Sally.

I’ve known Sally pretty much since I moved to my new apartment two years ago. She’s one of several strays who were around at the time, and the only one I can be certain is still around now. She’s hung out at my stoop periodically, originally because the people who lived next door had a cat bed out for her.

I’ve since learned more about her. I’ve learned she’s very slow to trust. That she even came round when I first moved in now seems remarkable. At the moment she’s again keeping her distance because I have another new neighbor, and they’ve begun putting things outside their door, and she’s evaluating.

She only recently returned to my stoop. You see, there was a dog. Not my dog. The neighbor from before this one. I perhaps contaminated myself by petting the dog, quite enthusiastically. It was a very good dog, and deserved the attention.

Sally didn’t agree.

Sally is a finicky eater. It took time to learn exactly what she liked. I only just nailed, it, too, and stocked up. And then the new neighbors had to unsettle things again.

Sally is not to be petted. No, not at all! She values her personal space. But she’ll follow me up the stairs, knowing I’ll have something for her. She’ll look into my apartment, mewl her thanks. And she’ll get on with it, and sometimes just hang out.

She’s got another human friend. As far as I know, they’ve never contaminated themselves, with dog or otherwise. They put food out reliably. She eats it. She comes round when it’s safe, here, all the same. Never pin yourself to a single source!

Sally is a stray. She values her independence. And she doesn’t mind humans helping out. She doesn’t mind sticking around. Within reason.

A Journal of the Pandemic #25

 

Baseball cards!

I didn’t think I was gonna talk about baseball cards during the pandemic, but here we are! Last year I thought, people maybe aren’t thinking baseball cards, and maybe that’ll make them more valuable than they have been since the glut of the ‘90s. It seems other people finally got around to thinking that, too.

I’ve only ever been a casual collector. Baseball cards are how I learned the classic “Bash Brothers” era Oakland A’s, which was my favorite team as a kid (and remains one I follow to this day), including Rickey Henderson, who I later learned played for about a million teams, about as many bases he stole in his career (and he hustled right to the very end in a bid to shore up his home run count).

When I was short of funds a decade ago I tried to sell baseball cards, but nobody wanted ‘em. They were worth nothing because there were so many cards, and collectors, from the time amply represented in my collection.

And I’ve bought baseball cards here an’ there ever since. Last year there was no trouble at all, as I said. You might not have been able to find toilet paper, but there were baseball cards! And I kept checking in, and then, a few months ago, I noticed there was none at all to be had, or found, at the local Target! I kept checking: no baseball cards.

Eventually I had a look online. Trading cards games apparently massively heated up, and whether or not this dragged in baseball cards, or if it’s a coincidence, I don’t know, but rabid collectors ruined it for everyone. 

Aside from desperation ten years back, I never really thought of baseball cards (or comic books) as a way to bring in money. There are plenty of people who flip these things for large sums of money, if they find themselves in possession of a valuable card (or comic) (or lunchbox! there’s a market for everything! apparently wrestler/actor/animal Dave Bautista collects lunchboxes) and know how to navigate the market. 

Dare I figure this out? Are baseball cards from last year as good as the new ones I haven’t seen from this year?

Hmmm…

Oz films 1914-1925

The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914) was the first theatrical version of Oz, based on the namesake book, seventh in the series, from 1913.

His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz (1914) predates The Scarecrow of Oz (1915), the ninth  book in the series.

The Magic Cloak of Oz (1914) is based on Queen Zixi of Ix (1905), an unofficial entry in the series.

The Wizard of Oz (1925) is a fanciful, loose adaptation of the first book, and unlike the three previous films has no involvement from L. Frank Baum, who died five years prior. Its biggest claim to fame is featuring a pre-Laurel & Hardy Oliver Hardy.

It’s interesting to watch this early Oz. They’re all silent films, of course, and rely heavily on slapstick of one kind or another, and capture none of the hilarious dialogue the books feature so generously. Baum was a theater man before Oz, and it’s evident from how showy his film versions are. The books are more about social satire, but that’s hard to convey, much less emphasize, in the early film format. 

Watching them is an object lesson in the elasticity of storytelling between formats, and a lucid tour of early Oz history.

Dark Matter: Danab Cycle

One of the pesky side-effects of suspending comments is that I can’t at least see people cheering (or pretending to!) a new release. I guess the book that is the reason for my newest release, Danab Cycle, is itself getting released next week. Danab Cycle is a tour of the short fiction I’ve been carving out of the Space Corps saga for the past decade, so it’s more important than the impetus that spurred it to publication. If you’re curious about what I’ve talked so much about over the years, it’s a great place to start.

...Technically if you do, there’s somewhat of a lie in it. Two stories in it, not one, have not been seen elsewhere or appeared in Sigild, unless you count those folks who thought one was possibly eleventh best. At the time I meant to distinguish that it had at least been seen by readers in some capacity, but I’m not sure I nailed the wording. Well.

Dead Butlers, In the Leviathan, Collider

A relative few minutes ago I finished up another comic script project, Dead Butlers, over at Sigild, an interlocking twenty-two page Batman pastiche that expanded past its original parameters (by ten script pages!). It was just one of those things that struck as an interesting idea and just sort of continued to blossom, and anyway was great fun to write along the way.

Yesterday I had a thunderbolt concerning In the Leviathan, a work in progress that suddenly came into vivid shape. Part of that is because I sent Nazi Crimes to one of my favorite cousins, and she almost immediately texted back incredibly enthusiastic initial thoughts, and we talked a little about the Montague story, and where I saw it heading, so somewhere in the back of my mind it must have been rattling waiting for that moment.

Concerning Collider, the project I really thought I was writing, finally, I had paused on after actually getting started on it, but it wasn’t feeling right and eventually I realized it was because I wasn’t telling it right. And so I hit the pause button and almost immediately knew what needed changing, and so that was pretty great.

I sent some poems to a literary journal tangentially related to my alma mater last weekend, so that was pretty interesting. No idea if they have a shot at acceptance, but it’s the first time in a long time I’ve submitted poetry anywhere. 

2020 Box Office Top Ten

The strangest year yet at the box office thanks to the pandemic, obviously the results will always look weird, so let’s have a look, via Box Office Mojo as of today, for the top ten movies released during 2020:

1. Bad Boys for Life - $206 million - For a year that also ended up known for the second wave of Black Lives Matter protests, it’s surely an irony that the third Will Smith/Martin Lawrence buddy cop flick ended up the highest grossing film at the US box office.
2. Sonic the Hedgehog - $148 million - I prefer to think of this as a Jim Carrey movie, his big mainstream comeback, and by far his biggest box office success in years.
3. Birds of Prey and the Fabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn - $84 million - Here’s where the skewed box office really sets in. You’d have to go back decades to find a year where a film made the top ten without having reached at least a hundred million (1995, Die Hard with a Vengeance at seventh place with $92 million). And this is the highest grossing superhero movie! 
4. Dolittle - $77 million - Stop me if you would’ve predicted this: Robert Downey Jr. starring in a movie that is quickly forgotten that somehow still ranks as one of the top box office draws of the year. Only in 2020, folks.
5. The Invisible Man - $70 million - One of the modern horror hits that I couldn’t care less about.
6. The Call of the Wild - $62 million - A movie released just before the pandemic hit that probably would’ve made about as much after theaters reopened.
7. Onward - $61 million - Likewise. A minor Pixar effort later eclipsed by Soul.
8. Tenet - $57 million - Christopher Nolan drew criticism insisting that it be released in theaters. Managed to be the biggest hit post-shutdown anyway.
9. The Croods: A New Age - $56 million - Family movies were an obvious boon in the pandemic era.
10. Wonder Woman 1984 - $46 million - Closing out the list is the biggest superhero release post-shutdown.

I guess I’m not even unofficially doing A to Z this year...

Across my network of blogs, some of which probably owe their existence to the challenge, I am apparently not doing the A to Z this year. This is possibly the first time since 2012 that this will be true. Which is kind of sad.

This wasn’t a deliberate choice. It just kind of happened. I did the challenge as an official participant many times, and unofficially (not linked into the sign-up) several times, too. I even did the challenge simultaneously on several blogs a few times. Once I got a novella out of it. 

The challenge has been good to me. At the moment, I am committed to working on a new manuscript, which cancelled out an ambition to tackle another serialized story in official/unofficial participation.

There’s always next year.

A Journal of the Pandemic #24

A year ago today, I wrote about the pandemic for the first time.

A year ago, I was angry that a much-anticipated family reunion for my dad’s seventieth birthday had been cancelled. He turns seventy-one on Thursday, and there has been not one hint of a do-over, and in my conversation with him yesterday, he sounded disappointed that he will likely not receive even one visit, even from the son who lives forty minutes away.

And this is what’s wrong. This is what was stolen from us. 

A year ago, and now here a year later, we’re inches closer to resuming ordinary life. Inches, because while the vaccines roll out and states reopen, we have still yet to grasp the full impact of the shutdowns. Not even close.

Single parents have struggled with the realities of distance learning. Students have lacked structure in their education. And while everyone has hammered everyone else about “not taking this seriously enough,” adherence to basic protocols has varied greatly. You hear endless condemnation for large gatherings (unless it’s a protest), and yet family gatherings have continued, domestic interstate travel, with little concern for quarantine measures.

Those of us following the rules have lost the most, and we don’t even care.

In some ways, the pandemic has been exceptionally good for me. I’ve been able to refocus on my writing in ways I haven’t been able to for years. That’s great! But it comes with a terrible cost. It’s been a year and three months since I’ve spent time, in-person, with my niece. I haven’t even met my new nephew. And this is extremely unlikely to change soon. I currently have no idea when it might.

The family reunion was cancelled. We set up a series of family phone calls, but somehow I started to feel only alienated because of them, and as they continued, I enjoyed them less, and by Christmas the very idea of them ruined the entire day. I have never had worse relations with my entire family than in the past year.

Oh, and the pandemic itself! A year later and I still don’t personally know a single person who died directly because of it. Everything I’ve experienced has been a result of side-effects.

Danab Cycle, Nazi Crimes released

 

Nazi Crimes was released last November; have a look at the Amazon listing here.

Danab Cycle has just been released.  You can find the Amazon listing here.

Both are short story collections.  Nazi Crimes features material almost entirely written in 2020, in a variety of genres.  Danab Cycle features material written generally in the past decade, and is intended as a kind of overview of the Space Corps saga, covering a number of interesting angles that serve as excellent entry points.

Both are available only in paperback.

Danab Cycle editing

Last week I finished up editing Danab Cycle, a short story collection of Space Corps material. This is a result of the IWSG exit at the start of the year. I’ve amassed a good number of stories over the years from the saga, and this collection represents the material that hasn’t yet been published elsewhere. I’ll link and feature the cover later (as well as a formal announcement for last year’s Nazi Crimes, another collection), but I figured it was worth mentioning here ahead of time.

Editing the collection was interesting, as always, finding ways to improve as necessary, and really just revisiting, in some cases, work I hadn’t had a look at in years. Tonally there’s a good range. There’s one new story unseen anywhere else, based on what I used to consider a potential comic book (and even commissioned artwork for), which I expanded further in the editing process.

I’m all the more proud, as I have been anytime I’ve worked on a writing project recently, for making the time to do it. I don’t know, it seems in recent years my attitude has changed about what it looks like to spend time writing. I used to be fine taking long breaks between projects, but that was when I was tackling long projects routinely. When that period ended, I didn’t realize how far I drifted from it until I realized I wasn’t even tackling long projects anymore.

This ended up on my mind, naturally, since my next project is of course a long project, the second Danab Cycle/Space Corps book-length manuscript, Collider, the outline for which I am finally 100% satisfied has reached workable condition. So I will certainly keep you posted on how that develops. And hopefully I start writing it soon, too...

Comments Currently Disabled

I apologize for the inconvenience, but for the foreseeable future, comments will be disabled on this and my other blogs, as a longtime internet acquaintance is currently experiencing a digital stroke, and hopefully this will help convince him once and for all that he can move on. It’s only been nearly a decade of pointless dithering. And only a few weeks of the stroke. So I anticipate bringing comments back...next millennium? Does that sound good to you? Most of the people visiting me I visit anyway, so I will try to keep up correspondence better that way. 

Thank you for your time.

A Journal of the Pandemic #23

Well, I don’t know about you, but at this point it’s no longer a question: There are people who talk about COVID-19 numbers being purposely inflated, but at my workplace there has been a consistent, concerted effort to downplay infections.

Is this common? For everything that’s been said about the pandemic, I personally have seen very little chatter about what it’s like to actually experience it. There has certainly been plenty of talk about the effects on the job market, schooling, sports, but not much on what people have experienced in their everyday lives. Maybe glimpses into isolation, but, well, I don’t know. That’s a large part of why I’ve been writing this series. I wanted to document my thoughts along the way. This is as significant a moment in history as I have yet lived through, something that has extended to very close to a year at this point, and of course whatever the effects of vaccine rollout, will linger for probably much of 2021 at least.

The stimulus money, for me, has been a bonus. The second installment I decided to use in part to read comics, DC’s Future State slate, which is a repurposing of what was originally intended to be another line-wide revamp, akin to the Silver Age, a new generation of heroes inhabiting familiar roles. So far I’ve really enjoyed it. One month down, one to go. I’ve been ordering them from Midtown. I panicked this past week because I ran into a roadblock for a release for the first time. I thought speculators had spoiled the second issue of a Teen Titans story featuring the in-continuity debut of Red X, a character previously featured in the cartoons. But then it became available soon enough, and I made Midtown even happier by ordering even more...

I joined the first decade of the new millennium a few weeks back by actually getting a Blu-ray player.  By the end of this decade I might even have a Netflix account! 

My sister just retired from the Air Force after twenty years. The pandemic prevented me from even considering attending the ceremony (which I had been looking forward to ever since my brother-in-law’s). Well. She’s a full-time mom now, about six months into the life of her son (the Burrito’s baby brother). I sent her a card in which I tried to express how proud I am of everything she accomplished in her career.

The Super Bowl is in town! I’m not attending, and won’t really explore the attractions, but obviously this is not a normal Super Bowl and as such the economic and visitor rush is not going to happen, and really, the small sampling of neighborhoods I took this morning does not reveal an abundance of excitement (maybe elsewhere in town the Gasparilla faithful decked themselves out for this, too). At work there were a lot of jerseys. I made a deal with a coworker I can’t possibly lose concerning the outcome (because win or lose Tom Brady already makes further history just by being in the game). 

But it’s been nice to hear about all the healthcare workers getting tickets. Actual tickets were priced to highly discourage attendance, although there will be some of that, and another coworker will be moonlighting, so I will know someone there. As they say round here, “Raise the flag.”

I actually have been writing recently. This year will be a little interesting in at least one regard: I’ve got a project where I will write a new chapter once a month. Thankfully, before last month was over I even figured out how to write the thing. And of course Danab Cycle business, in a variety of ways, including a short story collection. I did a lot of small projects last year. This year the goal is larger scope. One being the first full-length manuscript in about seven years. My work schedule is (probably) changing in a few weeks. It might mean less reading. But if so, then more writing. Or maybe balancing both. 

We’ll see!

Danab Cycle

Recently I have been having one breakthrough after another with Collider, which is part of what here I’ve been calling the Space Corps books, but perhaps will be known as the Danab Cycle, so I’m transitioning that label with this post.

This is a story, Collider specifically and Danab Cycle in general, that I have been working on for a quarter century. I was a kid spitballing a version of Star Trek when it began, but over the years the idea has grown in sophistication and nowhere was it more necessary than in fleshing out what exactly Collider itself is supposed to be. There was no coherent story originally, but funny enough there was a broad arc that needed to be supported, and as I saw that more and more clearly, I better understood what the book itself should look like.

Writing is a bit like excavation, or even the old anecdote of Michelangelo freeing an existing statue from stone. It’s not always clear what the story is. Sometimes it comes to you in little thunderstrikes. You realize this is exactly what it is. Hopefully on the other end, to the reader, this is how it feels, that this was the best way to do it. (As a reader, too, this is how I approach it, and certainly, there will always be interpretations and opinions, although some are better than others, just as in the storytelling itself.)

So these are the kinds of ideas I’ve had recently; “Why didn’t I see that before???” Characters, sometimes minor ones, sometimes the most important ones, finally hitting their marks. 

And I think it’s getting closer to being ready to be written. 

IWSG: This time it’s kind of permanent...

I’ve been a part of the Insecure Writers Support Group off and on for years. I’ve taken breaks, I got dropped from the rolls, found my way back on. Well, this is where we say goodbye.

Last fall I experienced a dramatic turn in my writing career. I submitted a story to an IWSG contest, and that was literally the last thing I ever did on that computer. I made my peace with losing things, and then moved on.

It’s just, I guess I wasn’t quite done with that process.

I honestly don’t really get how the IWSG is supposed to work. I get that it’s a blogging community like any other I’ve encountered. You theoretically get what you give. And I stopped visiting a lot of blogs a number of years ago. I get that it blogs once a month every month, and the point is to give encouragement to other members. 

I guess I kind of reached the point where it no longer made sense. I am not the kind of reader who will read books because it will make an author feel better. I read books I think will give me a transcendent experience. I read a lot of books, and I don’t always prove my choices right. 

I did find out that books blogging friends write are not necessarily what I want to read. They have different goals. So I stopped pursuing that a number of years ago.

And as far as I can tell, that’s the opposite of what communities like this one are about. I can’t tell for certain, but a lot of the IWSG is people who will read and/or support anything so long as they know the author. I can’t do that. The material always comes first for me. Well, unless I have already read the author and loved, or at least enjoyed, the results.

I may be missing out big time. There may be writers in the IWSG that would absolutely be up my alley. If there are I honestly have no idea. And that’s part of the problem. When everyone gets a glowing endorsement for everything it’s hard to know where the quality really is.

So I don’t see a point to continue on with the group. I’m not really the kind of writer who needs general encouragement. If someone has something specific and useful to say about my writing, that’s something. But I have had no one in the group appear at all interested in my actual writing. 

That’s kind of what I want if I am going to have connections in a writing community, or someone who is willing to work with me, help me specifically find specific resources that would help me. Not have resources available. Someone who took an active interest. In me.

That’s what really makes me insecure as a writer, the crushing loneliness, the isolation I have always experienced, and that the IWSG never really changed.

The impetus for this decision is absolutely petty. I admit that. I lost a contest. Ten writers at least were deemed to be demonstrably better than me. In hindsight I don’t even know why a group about insecurity is actively giving its membership more reasons to be insecure. That’s bush league. Someone somewhere has time to at least give feedback, to at least acknowledge members that contributed, to give them encouragement. Not make them wait months until the file and the cover were already finalized. 

So I will continue my writing journey. Rejection is a part of the job. But it doesn’t need to come from the people who are supposed to be there to give you encouragement.

Goodbye, IWSG.

IWSG January 2021

Hey Insecure Writers Support Group,

It’s always going to be easy to feel insecure when your own group continuously rejects you.

Well, just lost at another of your contests. 

Feeling insecure. 

T-Shirt Guy

That’s a picture from a year and a half ago, or maybe a lifetime ago, I don’t know. Anyway, it’s also a picture of me, and it’s also a picture of my niece (the Burrito). 

It’s also a picture of one of the many t-shirts my sister (the Burrito’s mom) has gotten me for Christmas over the years.

I feel like an idiot for realizing that this has in fact been a tradition of hers, and having only just realized it a few minutes ago. Yesterday I got her somewhat belated Christmas present in the mail. It was of course another t-shirt (Chateau Picard!). And a few minutes ago I think I also finally realized why my sister has had this tradition:

I’m a t-shirt guy. I mean, it’s not unusual to wear t-shirts. It’s not even unusual to have t-shirts with pop culture references. 

It may be unusual to keep restocking the wardrobe with new ones, year after year, decade after decade. And to have a sizable, rotating collection worn daily. Again, I am not wholly unique in this regard. I get that. But I think in my family this is one of the many things I pursue differently than the rest of us.

And my sister noticed.

And so pretty much without fail, she’s been helping me add to the collection at Christmas. Hey, I added to it last year myself, quite happily, with a Buccaneers Tom Brady t-shirt. I sent a picture of it around to the family. We’re New England folk. Everyone else might think the past twenty years were a fluke stoked by cheating, but for us (okay, some of us are traitors) Tom Grady is unquestionably great, and yeah, I was pretty pleased that when he finally left the Patriots, he ended up here in Tampa.

So yeah, I’ve got a lot of t-shirts, celebrating various things. I’ve got one I just wore the other day, from a party I attended in 2007 the same day the last Harry Potter was released, the same day I got copies of my first book. I’ve got a t-shirt celebrating Moxie, which is an old timey soft drink my hometown adopted. I’ve got one featuring Gasparilla, the Tampa pirate festival. Some people wear the same treasured t-shirt memory endlessly. Me, I’ve got dozens of those.

Sometimes, sadly, the collar frays. I have to concede to stop wearing it. I keep those, too, of course, add them to my “archives.”

What can I say? I’m a t-shirt guy. And thank you, Burrito’s mom, for being a part of that.