You see that? I tried doing an actual cover again, using, as I had the last time I did, Canva, and I think it's a decent one, but I'm not particularly objective about it, now am I?
This is of course Event Fatigue, the third and most recent of my Kindle Vella projects, a superhero story, but more specifically about mutants. Watching the X-Men movies over the years, especially the ones featuring the soft reboot starting First Class in which we follow the younger Professor X and Magneto as they start out being friends and watching the relationship evolve from that point (everyone says Apocalypse was a terrible failure, but I don't agree), and even feature far more cooperation between them than standard continuity suggests possible, I began to wonder what it would be like to totally reexamine all that, what it would be like to explore a mutant team and community where there develops a split in the ranks.
I had come up with a list of mutants for an otherwise unrelated project, and the idea for this story seemed like a perfect opportunity to finally use them. As usually happens when I develop an idea, the simplistic setup I started with didn't work out when I actually started writing it, and so that cover image, not quite the one I had for the Kindle Vella site but very close, becomes a joke you'll really just have to read the book to find out.
Since it was already the longest story I've written in about a decade, it's also the longest book I've published in the smallest format (5" by 8") Kindle has, which I've used for all the material I've published since 2016 (and the same as what I used for all the Mouldwarp Press Presents anthologies, dating back to 2013).
With the three other works of fiction I've announced previously, two volumes of poetry, and this year's Christmas collection, that's seven books I've published this year thanks to Kindle.
A little over a decade ago I had what I called my Trojan Year. I’m an amateur enthusiast of the Trojan War. That year I read a number of books that revolve around it. A few years ago I had my Quixote Year, in which I read and watched a number of works concerning Don Quixote. This year ended up being my Sherlock Year, in which I ended up experiencing a number of works featuring Sherlock Holmes.
The first was the complete stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I had bought a two-volume box set some years back and it took time to reach it in my reading adventures. Years ago this was because I would set up a reading list, but eventually it was because of how books fell on my bookshelves. I’ve got a lot of books, folks, and am always adding to them.
My only previous experience with Doyle’s material was the best-known Holmes story, TheHoundoftheBaskervilles, which I read for a class in high school. That was, at this point, a relative long time ago, and by 2022 I had only vague memories of it, as I discovered when I reached it.
Holmes casts a large shadow in modern fiction, not the least because he’s one of the most frequently adapted characters in film and television. The most recent high profile films featuring Holmes are the ones directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Robert Downey, Jr. I had never seen the second one. By coincidence I ended up buying the set of them and of course watching them this year. The second, GameofShadows, depicts Doyle’s famous attempt to kill off his own creation in the hopes of being able to move on to other material. Reading Doyle’s work, it is very evident how Holmes, and Doyle’s relationship to writing him, evolves, where it’s not merely the case of a brilliant detective solving mysteries, but Doyle constantly struggling to keep things interesting forhimself. In the beginning he clearly was using Holmes as an excuse to tell stories, so that Holmes was basically a featured element rather than the sole purpose of the stories, and later it’s clearly very much Doyle trying to prove he definitely has plenty of material to fill out a career worthy of Holmes, even though most of it is clearly being made up on the spot (you can see the exact point he realizes a character’s name can be adopted for Holmes’ brother, Mycroft, who shows up in fact and practice soon after).
I had picked up a volume of the Benedict Cumberbatch TV series at a library sale, and put it aside very much in the manner of my reading habits, but of course now was as good a time as any to finally get around to it. This was of course the role that thrust Cumberbatch to prominence (previously he’d been laboring at a career of no distinction; after he was always a featured if not star actor), so I had always meant to watch at least some of it.
Created by a producer of the modern DoctorWho, upon seeing this Holmes it was no surprise, since creatively it was approached in the very same manner. Like GameofShadows the material I reviewed features the showdown with Moriarty, whom Doyle and apparently everyone else since (Shadows seems to be an exception) failed to identify basically as a precursor to the modern gangster, to finally put him in some proper context, rather than simply as Holmes’ natural rival.
I also revisited some vintage screen material, including a lucky find I had previously experienced where an actor playing Watson sounds like Darth Vader, decades before Vader, for one brief expository moment. It took some doing to identify the exact material where this happens, as I had no intention to watch all of the material (although I did try and cover the adapting work), but the results are spelled out in a post elsewhere concerning much of the stuff George Lucas likely drew on to come up with Star Wars in its final form that seems to have eluded visible fan notice (somehow!!!).
Anyway, none of this is ever planned. That’s three theme years now. I have no plans to write detective fiction of my own, although I’ve touched on it now and then, more in the manner of Roberto Bolaño than Doyle.
I finally finished Event Fatigue over at Kindle Vella!
I've been slogging away at this sucker since January, originally a slow and sporadic pace, much as I'd done with the two previous stories I wrote for the platform, but started to realize, a few months ago, at that pace it was probably going to take forever, so I just settled into some daily writing for the first time in a while, and am pleased to have reached the end.
It's not very long, but it's the longest story I've written in about a decade, although ironically it's only about as long as what I had successfully done on a number of occasions previously by completing NaNoWriMo, fifty thousand words written in the month of November.
As with most of what I write, it didn't turn out as I imagined when I started in, but definitely as someone might expect who's ever read me before, although in a lot of respects, it's the most complete version of what I've done several times in the past, which is to track the perspectives of a large cast of characters, in this instance a group of mutant superheroes who experience a shocking death, and the story explains their reactions, how things got to that point, and how things turn out.
The term "event fatigue" will be familiar to comic book fans, who in recent decades have generally gotten tired of "event books," massive crossovers that always promise "everything will be different!" until, well, the next massive crossover. I use it to mean a number of things, including as a commentary on modern times, though never to exactly bludgeon the reader (there's plenty of that on social media, thank you very much).
A funny thing happened along the way, formatting-wise. I started out writing directly on the platform, but when I got into daily writing, I wrote into the Word document I was compiling chapters into, and pasting that into the platform messed up formatting on the platform itself, and I am not savvy enough to correct such things. As far as I can tell, no one is reading it there anyway, and the long-term goal is to get another paperback out of it (which, again, will be the longest I've released in a long time, and the longest in the format size I've been using for half a decade), which I plan to expend a little more marketing energy on than I usually do.
I've got other things to tackle. I've got the next Christmas collection (Uncle Toby), a story I meant to be writing all year (Death Is Wearing Me Out), and of course, as always, recently, Collider.
But it feels really, really good to have finished this!
Hey, so from what I understand, it's not a pandemic anymore.
After more than two years, very close to three, maybe there will be slightly less quibbling when the statement can be suggested, we're just about done with this thing.
I know, I know, it's not gone. It'll never be gone. Calling it epidemic means it'll be with us for a while yet, like the flu. I'd like to think we learned a few things from all of this. Maybe that when you're sick, take it seriously, for one. I don't know what else. Take your own lessons.
I can't get over that on the whole I've made it through the experience in a fairly privileged position, and that will have to be the dominant takeaway for me. I had a job, I kept the job, got extra money for continuing to work that job, never had a diagnosis (even if somehow I caught it without knowing it, never in any kind of debilitating way), didn't lose any immediate family members or friends. In fact, circling back around to the job itself, except for a few months, and one month sitting home, most of the time was business as usual. I don't have a job where it was ever feasible to do it remotely. I wore masks at work. I got used to it. I know this was difficult for a lot of people. A lot of people who did wear them never figured out how to wear them. Actually, I started out the pandemic wearing masks while also wearing glasses, and even figured that out without being driven insane. I had this great set of masks that had different mustaches on them. They became a part of my identity. I didn't imagine that possibility when I bought my first masks in May 2020. I'll actually miss wearing them, assuming the mandates don't somehow recur. As it is, I haven't put one on again since the mandates dropped again, the second time this year, a few weeks ago.
This is to say, this might be the last time I update this journal. Maybe just go back to, y'know, regular blogging about writing life, rather than life as it's been transformed over the past few years. This blog was launched specifically as a writers record, but I thought it would be irresponsible to omit such a monumental and prolonged experience from that record. I started it accidentally, and then I realized I had started a series, so I started numbering them, and then periodically updating as I thought I had something new to say. Thirty-three entries is a decent number. I've slowed my blogging dramatically since a decade ago, when I launched this blog, and the pace reduced even more during the pandemic, although probably writing about the pandemic here probably motivated me to write more than I might have otherwise.
Released as part of Dave Matthews Band's 2002 album Busted Stuff, "Bartender" is an epic jam song that, as far as I'm concerned, is the best song the band will likely ever produce.
It isn't one of their released singles. Unless you know the band, have attended or listened to one of their concerts, you probably have no idea it even exists. The funny thing is, Busted Stuff itself is, among the band's fans, a notable album insofar as it was material that was almost scrapped in favor of Everday, which was recorded later but released earlier, until it was decided to pursue what was becoming known as "The Lillywhite Sessions" again.
"Bartender" features some of Dave's most impassioned singing, and overt religious references, and the kind of concentrated lyrics you might not otherwise associate with the band's output (aside from all that pop aesthetic present on the Everyday album, and even in the rest of Busted Stuff, although at a more somber key), ultimately culminating in an extended although highly focused jam, a cathartic expression of the song's desperate mortal yearning.
Today, the band is a phenomenon mostly among its own fans, although twenty years ago it was one of the biggest bands in the world, a part of the last major wave of pop rock to enjoy significant mainstream success. "Ants Marching," "What Would You Say," these are songs you'd definitely know if you heard them. As rock's profile has sunk, so too has the band's. Where there was once a visible market for aging rockers, including the kind of push Prince got late in his life, all the way to the Super Bowl (which had become a kind of old rocker's home at that point) half-time show, now Dave is as invisible as modern rock itself. "Rock is dead." Well, it isn't, but as far as a lot of people are concerned, it might as well be.
But put "Bartender" on and you will feel it all over again, the primal, visceral effect rock at its best always delivers. There are no real comparisons to anything else in the band's catalog, and you have to look among the very best, most treasured of anyone else's to find them.
Simply put, in a hundred years, if anyone remembers the Dave Matthews Band, "Bartender" is likely to be the reason. This, for me, is the only real selling point for pop culture, if it will mean something to generations long removed from its original release. Anything can be popular in the moment. A lot of things can be enjoyable. But what next? What happens when everyone else isn't telling you to like it? What happens when it's just another artifact?
At their best, songs, whether in the rock genre or otherwise, are just waiting to be sung. In our era we think the whole composition is key, and as such we treat it like we do classical music. The old Stephen Foster folk songs are lyrics people know. Even if there were original recordings possible, would they, at this point, replace singing "Oh! Susanna" or "Camptown Races" yourself? Everything, eventually, becomes a folk song.
"Bartender," as glorious as it is as Dave sings it, as it's played around him, it was already one of those songs that I just had to sing, knowing that half of it that I loved so much was missing, would never be there except in my head as I sang. I had stopped playing the violin years before the song was ever composed, but it's the one song I always wish I were still playing that violin to help fill out. I knew how I would do it. There's this neat trick where you can have two strings hitting the same note, and it's one of the things I've always wanted to do, play "Bartender," because of that, because it would be so interesting to hear it coming from an instrument in my own hands.
So many critics knocked the film Yesterday because, they claimed, the Beatles songs couldn't possibly be popular today, released today, and maybe because I know the songs so well I just couldn't fathom it, loved so much, even as sung by Jack Malik, but I think the critics were idiots. Good songs will continue in the popular consciousness the way good poems have. It's the reason Bob Dylan has always been so celebrated, because at heart he has always been a poet, and a song is just a poem that sometimes has someone singing it brilliantly (and I'm sorry, but Dolly Parton lost all claim to "I Will Always Love You" when Whitney Houston chose to record it, make it truly immortal).
No one knows how things end up lasting. Shakespeare got salvaged from the scrapheap of history not because everyone remembered his plays so warmly, but because of the folios that reprinted the scripts, after his death. We still don't know who Homer was, or if he even existed. Melville ruined his career by publishing Moby-Dick. Eventually, critical appreciation recognizes genius. Students in classrooms bemoan having to learn about all the old things, but that's the culture, that's the sum of human greatness, whether it's fun or not.
Someday, "Bartender," in someone's recording, will be described, in its origin, as a traditional, no creator credited. It will still be a treasure. Twenty years is just a drop in the bucket for this one.
Such are the times we live in (and maybe they all are, and sometimes it's just easier to tell) where the way we interpret those times ends up inherently polarized. We're in the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a little earlier in the year it seemed as if we had finally begun to emerge from it, at least in some sense, drifting back into previous versions of "normal." The pandemic itself isn't over, and whatever progress we make back to "normal" can always suffer setbacks.
Which is to say, at work the pandemic has certainly been reasserting itself.
My job has been one of the rare experiences in this thing where "normal" was all but mandated to reassert itself as early as two years ago, which is also to say, the first year of the pandemic, 2020. To quickly recap, I experienced the initial quarantine phase in the month of April that year, but as of May I was headed back to work, and while it was a slow restart, it was otherwise work as usual. There's no such thing as teleworking my job, I assure you. So for the past two years I have very much been existing in a weird world of knowing things are different but also a certain amount of extreme continuity with as they were before the pandemic.
When the virus strikes we shut directly affected rooms down. For two years I was never actively in a room that faced this. That streak ended on Wednesday. I tested that same day, as I was admittedly sick, but the results came back negative; the same ol' sinus infection I always battle.
So I continued working.
A couple of weeks ago I was traveling for the first time during the pandemic. I headed to Alabama to attend my nephew's high school graduation. I will spare the details for those who feel particularly polarized, but suffice to say there were kids who were obviously sick I encountered along the way, and that's only what was obvious. If I held my head because a situation was frustrating, people immediately suspected it was for some other reason (you can guess).
Among the books I packed for the trip, which I didn't end up reading during it but soon after, was the first one I've read to be written during and thus reflective of pandemic life. As I've been saying, I fully expect this to be a regular feature of cultural life for many years to come. It will be inescapable, and I actually look forward to it; out of the news, into the literature. We've grown a little too comfortable looking at symptoms rather than the disease, as it were, so it'll be nice to see life reflected a little more directly, so in that way I'm actually thankful for getting to experience all of this.
For those who might be reading this but are unfamiliar with the story, this is, as the subtitle suggests, "a tale of twenty thousand leagues," the twenty thousand leagues, as in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne, also known as the Captain Nemo story.
Although my version doesn't lean on Nemo so much as the French biologist Pierre Aronnax, whose discovery of Nemo is the impetus for the original story. In the present, Pierre's descendants Sylvio and his son Julian embark on an improbable journey of resubmerging Nemo's ship, the Nautilus, which in recent decades has become a forgotten neighborhood landmark, the "yellow submarine" (several chapter titles are indeed drawn from the Beatles song), a journey of discovery and self-discovery.
It's another novella, but it was a project that started out much differently and ended up becoming a personal favorite, not the least because it drew on my own family ancestry, and family in general.
I originally began composing this back in February. Part of why I paused it was because I've been getting back into the swing of things, going out a lot more, and that's in large part because the pandemic is receding ever more gradually into the past. I think there's little doubt about that at this point. There are new surges happening, of course, and time will only tell how those develop, but the pandemic as it was for its first two years is effectively over.
Yeah!
At work, as of a few weeks ago, masks are no longer mandatory. When the pandemic began I ended up working at a new building with a lot of new people who didn't know what my face looked like under the mask (I had a bunch I cycled through, although I had a whole set of ones with various fancy mustaches on them; I don't remember if I mentioned them here previously), and so it has been a different kind of introduction. As it turns out, it's not easy to interpret what people actually look like just by their eyes! I think all those superheroes have it backwards. Keep the eyes! Hide the mouth! And I think everyone is getting used to this now. Probably!
I'm booking trips! I've already booked one to attend my oldest nephew's high school graduation. His birth back in 2004 was kind of the beginning of a whole journey for me, the first major event to occur post-college graduation for me, the first time I flew on a plane, the first time I visited the South (the first time I had Krispy Kreme! White Castle!), sort of the beginning of an extended new association with my other sister. Whom I intend to visit a little later, after she's given birth to her third child. And I will get to meet her second one, in person, for the first time! And reunite with the Burrito. Just waiting for approval of the days off, then book the flights...
It's still astonishing that the pandemic swallowed two whole years. Two years! And of course there are people who will continue to argue that we shouldn't believe it's over, and it's not, but it is. I'm plotting out what will probably be the last of the pandemic money, in conjunction with these trips. Some people have talked about money for the high gas prices, but that's not gonna happen. Yeah, Russia is busy trying desperately to start another world war, just as everyone else is trying desperately to avoid it, and that's caused gas prices to soar. When I began this in February the invasion of Ukraine had just begun, and I worried about how it would proceed, and of course that's yet another thing to monitor, and nobody can really guess about that.
Two years ago I had a month off of work, was greatly irritated that my previous plans to visit family had been cancelled, and here on the other side, during two years of watching other people continue to travel, and enduring a previous surge at the end of 2021 that made it look like 2022 would be exactly like the previous two years, and now this, booking trips, and these are definitely going to happen, I really believe that. I mean, Spider-Man: No Way Home made crazy money at the box office. It's still making money, and here it's April, and movies are being blockbusters again, not just in China, but around the world, and right here in the US. Those pesky gas prices have been making packages take longer than usual, but on the whole, things're lookin' pretty gooood.
I want to believe this is the last time I write about the pandemic while it's an active thing here. Is that reasonable? I think it's reasonable. I hope things are looking good for you, too.
I've added Event Fatigue to the list of my Kindle Vella projects on the right. Apparently I skipped a month between chapters, but will be digging back in. Two additional will be populating today, and, well, there are plenty more to come.
Happily I can announce the release of a book from the second Kindle Vella project, Nine Panel Grid!
Keeping my present preferences, there is only a paperback release, which you can find here. This is something of a metafiction, a story about a comic book that doesn't exist, detailing what happens in its final issue, including descriptions of art that does not exist, and a history that is equally fictional. It involves characters I began working on nearly two decades ago, including one I created nearly three decades ago. So it's got a lot of real history behind it, too, plus a bonus comic book script that's a version of Batman relevant to the story. It's very much a project that's very interesting to me, and I will be peddling copies to a comic book shop that recently opened down the road from me, and I will keep you informed about that as things develope.
A few weeks before this one I also released World Famous, a story I worked on occasionally throughout 2021 (and finished earlier this year).
Likewise this is only a paperback release, which you can find here. As the cover heavily implies, this one is about professional wrestling, and draws on stuff I've been dabbling with for the same general three decade period, so this has certainly been a good time to be writing stories on old material for me.
Later I will be releasing my first Kindle Vella project, Aronnax, when I decide what (if anything) to add in order to bulk up the page count a little. I have a timeline I put together for the abortive project that led to Aronnax, and I could certainly include the associated essay as well. Who knows what else.
We are now in the third year of the pandemic. I say this at the start of 2022, since we are in an apparent surge as the Omicron variant has once again forced the conversation back into the forefront. I say this as my dad has recovered from his own bout with COVID-19, and in acknowledgment at the loss of Gene Pelletier, a close family friend who with his wife suffered through it at the same time. I say this as my place of work has elevated its response level back to where it was, nominally, at the pandemic's peak. I say this knowing that vaccines and boosters and masks remain sources of deep contention. I say this knowing I had plans to travel this year. I say this knowing, even though I've known many people who have traveled, as far back as 2020 (which indeed seems like a long time ago, somehow), that one of the clearest ways to combat the spread, as far I'm concerned, is not to travel. I say this as someone who wants to travel, who wants to see family, in person, again...
Gene and his wife were key figures in my mom's battle with cancer. When she died in 2015, they were certain sources of support. When I spent my year with my niece, they were again pillars of my life. Gene was the kind of person who I didn't know very well, but for whom it didn't matter. He was my kind of guy. He knew his way around a joke. I'd known him, tangentially, before ending up living in the same park, when he was not only friend but neighbor.
His memorial service was yesterday. I wish I could have been there. If I owe anyone that it would be Gene and his wife.
I'm kind of sick of the pandemic. I don't honestly know how anyone wouldn't be. I'm sick of it. I think even those morbidly fascinated with being "right about it" have lost steam. They want to move on, too. Obviously the American/global box office somehow managed to find enough people to make history with Spider-Man: No Way Home, so there may yet be an end in sight. Hopefully.
Hopefully. And, again, we're nowhere close to a true reckoning with the experience. It's barely begun. There will be pandemic stories for the rest of our lives. Fifty years from now there will be generations for whom it's only a matter of history, something they're forced to learn in school, and for most of whom it will barely register as real. But for us, it's an everyday fact that will remain fact, something we are going to have to deal with, long after we've sorted out all the immediate fallout, the ramifications, and yeah, the virus itself. Probably it's a shot we're going to get annually. Probably? Definitely. It's the next flu shot. Of course it is.
In my blogging community, everyone seems to have remained pretty steadfastly silent on the subject. I guarantee, in a few years even these bloggers will be talking endlessly about it. In fifty years it might be the only thing anyone knows about this era. Except those pesky students. Doing whatever delinquent things kids will do in the (20)70s...
To get there, to see that, I would have to live into my nineties. This is hardly impossible. I've known a few people who did.
I've already taken a stab at writing pandemic fiction. I imagine I probably will again in the future. But perhaps once life has decided normal looks like normal used to. If that's even possible anymore...
I sketched up the major projects I'll be tackling this year, Event Fatigue (the third Kindle Vella; previously reported as Ex-Ray: Event Fatigue) and Death Is Wearing Me Out (the once-monthly project succeeding World Famous; a ghost story, since it's apparently the thing that attracts me at the moment). Both should be very, very interesting, and more accessible than their predecessors (World Famous, being about wrestling, and Nine Panel Grid, which is probably quite impenetrable).
But let's talk about those a little more, shall we? Technically I should've finished World Famous by the end of last year. Didn't really turn out that way. I have two chapters yet to write, but they'll be easy enough to finish, and would've been done this morning if the very computer I'm using at the moment had cooperated (clever companies think they improve everything when they sometimes make them needlessly complicated). In hindsight I'm all the happier I chose to do this a year ago, and that I plugged away at it dutifully (sometimes with a little catching up).
Even Nine Panel Grid, since it handles a story I intended to write nearly two decades earlier (alas, a comics contest I probably hilariously fell far short of even coming close to winning). I'm now six chapters away from finishing, about a month and a half, since it's mostly a once-a-week project, having started at the beginning of October.
Event Fatigue will be forty-four chapters, the longest by far (double the length of Nine Panel) I've tackled for Kindle Vella. I still need to flesh out the story, but it's going to be pretty straight-forward, and also involve superheroes. I picked out a cover image that hopefully at least stands out a little better than my last two. It also picks up characters originally derived from an older project, which only occurred to me when I finally sat down to begin an outline. This one should be fun.
I'm still writing up material for Substack, in the meantime. I have no idea if I have a chance at developing an actual following there, but it's worth an effort. I plan to devote one installment to Nine Panel Grid, perhaps write an actual story (you'd understand if you had a look at Nine Panel exactly what I'm talking about) and the journey to working on it. I did write a story in the Space Corps saga, and probably will do more in the future.
I know I was just talking about Space Colony Bactria, and obviously Collider, and I really need to get on Montague, but as a writer doing it on the side, I have to decide the projects that can work around the schedule.
