Finally (really!) writing Collider

I started writing Collider yesterday. 

It’s only about thirty years in the making. When I first came up with the Space Corps stories, the Danab didn’t even exist. It’s since become known as the Danab Cycle. I didn’t really have a story, back then, but I stumbled into one when I very unexpectedly decided to kill off one of the main characters early on.  Hey, I’m a Star Trek geek. I’m sure there was some Tasha Yar reasoning involved. 

As the years advanced, I worked on the story until everything about it made sense. I even figured out why that character’s death meant something. I wrote a novella, eventually, dealing specifically with that (Terrestrial Affairs), which kind of lightened the load a little. It remains absolutely essential to this story, but the whole story doesn’t have to explain why it happened so much as what resulted. 

I had the last of the needful breakthroughs, really, only later in the day. So I added to what I wrote yesterday this morning. And can now plunge confidently forward.

I‘ll keep you posted…

Abigail Only!

Last week I finalized and Amazon published Abigail Only, the 2024 family Christmas collection.

Every year this millennium (or more or less) I've written and distributed at least a poem each Christmas for family, and since 2020 I've led the chapbooks I've been distributing with novellas.  This year's was a departure from the ones I'd been writing, the first one set in the real world rather than the fantasy land of Wendale.  This year I had the story already set, but the title was inspired by something my sister said in relation to my newest and possibly last of all niece, a phrase that just seemed irresistible.

Among the other material I included is a short story relating to the Danab Cycle, a follow-up to a story I wrote years ago that I'd been wanting to revisit, and anyway helps further flesh out Danab society, which since I decided finally to call the Space Corps stories the Danab Cycle because of their huge importance in the saga, was always necessary as I've gotten around to writing more of it, and am headed steadily toward writing Collider, thirty years in the making...Before I get there, though, I have another short project I want to tackle, examining a kind of origin (in this world there are a lot of origin stories that need telling, and I've got two of the last books I intend to write dedicated to the two biggest secret origins of the whole saga), what exactly might be known about all this in the present day, Earth, when nothing at all here seems to be happening in relation to it.

Updates on Current Doings (or, 2022 Begins to Take Shape)

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.  

As always, we'll see.

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.

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...

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. 

A Journal of the Pandemic #21

Hey, you may have heard of something called COVID-19? Kind of a thing that’s been happening this year?

I haven’t written an entry in this series since September. As I write this one, we’ve become entangled in the winter surge, that thing that was looming nebulously all year, and now it’s arrived. Or as HBO might have put it, “winter is coming.”

Obviously plenty has happened since September. Biden won the election. As a result, we’re scheduled for a shutdown early next year. I’m kind of looking forward to it. At work it seems as if in order to get any real response done management needs for someone else to make a decision about how seriously to take the pandemic.

And let me explain that. We lost a couple staff members mysteriously this week. Nobody knew what was happening. By the end of the week we learned unofficially that they of course were tangled up with COVID-19. Nothing was done except replacements brought in as necessary. And they were staff members who absolutely intersected with the whole facility. We had a whole class quarantine for two weeks without signage being hung explaining why. Measures were subsequently put in place to prevent cross-room contamination in playground areas...after it was totally ignored that the one class had absolutely interacted with other classes in playground areas before its quarantine.

(Here I’ll include a parenthetical update on my baby room. As I reviewed what was happening when last I wrote we had just gotten our first two new babies! We ended up getting two more regulars, although it was three until one went on reserve status, their dad sort of permanently out of work because pandemic time has made it difficult for him to be a barber. Three young wiggly babies making strides at tangible mobility, one older baby making strides to standing! Walking! Independently! For all the occasional hiccups, it’s, for me, an inexpressibly irresistibly magical age.)

And I get that the bottom line is always money, that it would be inconvenient to have made any other decisions than have been made.

But.

Here I will once again clarify that I never believed for a moment that draconian methods were ever necessary, but once the decision was made, nearly everywhere, globally, it became irresponsible for anyone to deliberately skirt them without justification, without a clear, honest, transparent method behind the reasoning. Which I’m certain I am not alone in experiencing.

Because of the heavy political polarization at least here in the States, we tend to assume that skirting mandates equates a conservative agenda. That’s the kind of useless simplistic reasoning that absolutely needs to end. I guarantee it isn’t that black and white, and never was. 

My private life continues apace. I published a collection of short stories a few weeks back, collecting material that had previously been earmarked for a friend’s anthology they decided against pursuing in favor of a movie website. (I still have no idea why they couldn’t do both, but apparently some people can’t multitask; I’ve been dwelling recently on the amount of blogging I used to do, and still trying to rationalize how none of it really made an impact so it’s just as well to not continue in that fashion.)

I also published my Christmas collection and sent it out to family. The past few years I was circulating it only to my niece, but figured this year of all years I could expand back outward.

Working on those two publications was a necessary culmination for the year I’ve been having. They were, in their finished forms, a response to the death of my previous computer. I had to totally rewrite the Christmas collection, but in a weird sort of way it was a good thing, therapeutic, as part of it allowed me to simultaneously resurrect the best of the lost Squire’s History of Oz material, the short story I’d written, now reworked as an original story, one I had been planning to write for a while.

I’ve also been plugging away at Space Corps, including replacing ideas that were eaten by the previous computer, which again turned out to be okay. One book I’ve been outlining I had the chance to completely rethink again, and plans for two more had chances for fresh perspectives as well, including the last one in the whole cycle, which took on a drastic new shape inspired in part by some genealogy work I did a few months ago, trying to figure out where exactly my roots lie.

I’ve been staying mostly home. No huge change from any other year, just more so, some by necessity (libraries here are only just beginning, cautiously, to reopen, so my weekends remain home bound, a stark contrast to what was happening a year ago). I did shop on Black Friday, at a comic book store, where I seemed to spend the bulk of my time away from where everyone else was, catching up with recent comics and seeing what I could find in the used collections (where I scored a copy of Steven Seagle’s It’s A Bird). Ironically, the generous back issue sale that enticed others I had already decided to stay away from, having read, perhaps, enough random old comics this year.

This week I kept being reminded how much I miss my niece. Last Sunday was a good call with dad, who hasn’t gotten to see his two Maine-based grandsons since March, partly because my brother has decided he can do without him. We had a rare phone conversation about that a few months back. I tried to make a case for dad, but it obviously left little enough impression. I wonder how many families are losing shape because of the pandemic, and how long, if mended at all, these altered states will endure.

Edgar Wright watched a lot of art movies. I watched a lot of movies, too, but not a lot of overlap there. Kenny Omega just made history. So things are interesting.

And maybe they’re going to be interesting in a positive way.

A Fruitful Day for Ideas

 Today turned out to be a good day to get back on the horse, or at least the beginning of getting back on it.

Since the death of my previous computer, I’ve kind of slowly gotten back to work. Looking back over everything I’ve already done this year, I see that I was busier than I sometimes allow myself to think, a lot of projects (some since lost, including the big revision project for a contest I’m reasonably sure I won’t be winning because Submittable wasn’t letting me attach the file but still somehow let me “submit,” and at the time I convinced myself it had somehow worked out despite the issues the site was having...) that were all in themselves well worth tackling, and all of which in some ways built on each other.

Anyway, one of the things that was eaten was a new vision of Collider, a long-term project a quarter century in the making that’s the first Space Corps story I ever began working on. Today I did a fresh take of the outline as I recently radically reconsidered it, building on elements I developed during Terrestrial Affairs, the novella from a few years back. It’s strange how much can change but still the basic shape remains as first begun in the mid-90s. Realizing this was possible was part of the reason I didn’t completely freak out over my computer dying and erasing the last version.

I also tackled an outline for George & Gracie, the novella I’ll be including in my Christmas poems collection this year (which is another project being revisited, with the novella being a substitute for two shorter works I lost and don’t want to rewrite). These collections are for my niece, the Burrito, although this year I plan to send the results around to family, in the hopes they might actually begin to see me as a legitimate writer (and not as “gee wiz that dude who keeps trying to make that happen,” which is the recent impression I kind of got from my dad). Anyway, it’s something I’m really excited to tackle, and will be the first thing I work on actually writing.

I also came up two other ideas today, “Kingslayer” and “Old Brown’s Daughter,” though I won’t really talk about what exactly they are here, although they reminded me about an idea I had earlier in the year, “Old Wizards,” and how much that would be fun to get back to. (“Old” being in a title twice is probably a coincidence.) These are ideas that practically told themselves when I conceived them. You don’t take such ideas lightly.

Plus today was the second day of my latest comic book scripting project, Catman/Batwoman, which nominally is a riff on Tom King’s real comic, Batman/Catwoman. It’s going to be the shortest to date, twelve script pages. But nine panel grids every page! (For those who don’t know, “Catman” is an actual DC character. The “Batwoman” indicated is actually Barbara Gordon, the original and most famous Batgirl, who has never actually been referred to as Batwoman. Except in this project. Because: symmetry.)

The Computer Ate My Homework

 Well, it’s official. My computer ate my homework. Which is to say, my computer died and took my files with it.

Three weeks ago I got stuck in the rain, and I happened to have my tablet with me. It was a horrendous downpour. I don’t know if it’s because I didn’t get it to a shop until the end of the week, or if it died more or less instantly, but the end result was, because it was such a compact instrument, it was a complicated business just to answer whether or not my files were retrievable even before the diagnosis, and certainly out of the question after.

So I lost material. I lost the whole Oz affair. I lost Squire’s History of Oz, the greater nonfiction work, and “Falling Toward Oz,” which for me was far more valuable. I talked about this stuff here. It was actually some of the last material I actively talked about here. If COVID-10 hadn’t hit, this would not have even been an issue. I don’t have Wi-Fi at home. I travel to get it. This was far easier pre-pandemic, and even beyond that, when everything closed, it was more or less around the time I was completing this work. I’d’ve self-published it months ago. 

But now it’s been eaten. If I wanted, I could reconstruct the book itself and even tackle the story again. I’m not feeling especially motivated to do that at the moment. I’m not grieving. I kind of figured this was going to be the result, and so I made peace with it the day I turned the tablet into the shop.

I lost the manuscript I carved out of In the Land of Pangaea, something I didn’t really talk about here, something I did earlier in the summer and submitted to a contest. All the work on that is lost unless by some miracle it has legs in the contest. Again, I could be okay with that. I loved working on that thing. It was if nothing else an excellent exercise in revision. 

I lost this year’s Christmas poem package for my niece! I wrote it ridiculously early as it was, so I can always rewrite that well before the end of the year. I know the bones of what I wrote. I can either attempt to replicate or do something new. It’s okay.

I lost some plotting for Space Corps! I didn’t lose the major Space Corps material. I have the Seven Thunders manuscript, and notes in an actual notebook for most of what I had been working on, and copies attached to emails for other things. There’s so much already quite unwritten about Space Corps anyway, it’s difficult to say what can be lost in such a manner as this. Having Seven Thunders as it is, and in the revised form as I’ve worked on it, is the main thing, and what would’ve been the big loss in a previous computer loss.

That’s not everything, but those are the highlights. I have email copies of stories I wrote this year. I will have to revert to backups for additional poetry collections, whenever I get around to that project again, losing whatever work I had done in that regard. (I think it eats what would’ve been the next release, in the state I left it, which again would not have been a problem pre-shutdown, because I would have published it well before this happened).

Last week I bought a school-sized (rather than pocket-sized) notebook, with the intention to perhaps work on stories and/or notes there. This would not be a guarantee against loss, either, but it would offer a different level of control. I have some really old notes! Stuff dating back to probably 1996 at least, a lot of old Space Corps material. That’s how I always did it before. Then at some point I started doing it on a computer, and when I had a printer handy would carefully print it out (another backup model!). Technically I have a printer now but have no idea if it actually works. I inherited from my sister. Has been sitting on a desk I don’t work at (I find desks hard to work at for extended periods, unless they’re big, and this one isn’t).

And at some point I will buy a new computer of some extraction. And be very, very careful, especially as it comes to file preservation!

Not-the-Tonys 2020

 My blogging buddy Squid does this every year, and I thought, why not? Why not do a best-of yearly stamp, this of all years? Very slowly I’ve been rethinking the idea of having multiple blogs but only talking about my writing (mostly) on this one, especially as I’ve slowed my blogging in general, and it gets a little depressing talking only about the pandemic here (which is what I’ve done for months here). So here are some highlights of 2020 so far, and what lies ahead the rest of the year:

Favorite Writing Project:

Let’s start with a writing thought on a writers blog! On Monday I submitted a story to the IWSG anthology, and it involved my Space Corps saga, and, regardless of how it fares with the judges, I think I did something really good with it. I’ve been taking a lot of creative risks this year, and I think it’s starting to pay off with my work. (Monday it also rained on me and potentially wrecked my computer and lost me a lot of material...but I think I could actually be okay with it. Mostly. I can rebuild Bionic Man style.)

Favorite Family Memory:

A few months back it was a year ago I stopped actively participating in my niece’s life when she moved on to Texas. I had a meltdown over that but was able to recover. As of earlier this month she’s a big sister! So another adventure is just beginning. I’m happy that she has new experiences to look forward to as she continues to grow up. It was always her life anyway, and I was always privileged to play any part in it, and now I can more clearly see where it’s her journey and I am a privileged observer. (But yeah, I write yearly Christmas poem chapbooks for her. I already wrote this year’s. Or will get to write it again, depending.)

Favorite Work Memory:

Like everyone, work has taken some interesting turns this year for me. (And I never forget how privileged I’ve been to be relatively unaffected.) Early in the year I was given pre-pandemic curveballs that created a lot of stress. I took it as an opportunity to grow and to put money where my mouth was, looking at challenge babies as a challenge worth taking. I saw real progress as a result! Similarly, during the pandemic I was given another curveball, and can honestly say the last day of the particular challenge I ended with a real victory. Every moment isn’t a victory. There are defeats. The reward of victories makes them worth it.

Favorite Book (New):

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, his second book, published a decade after his first (How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe). Yu is a brilliant writer capable of viewing his topics in truly unusual ways, which here means exploring the Chinese-American experience in ways we don’t tend to consider. In a year where BLM once again surged in the public consciousness, Yu’s work is a great reminder that all minorities face challenges.

Favorite Book (Old):

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev, another great Russian novel, exploring the idea of social change in surprisingly relevant ways.

Favorite Book (Comic):

Folklords by Matt Kindt, a miniseries I randomly sampled and then felt compelled to finish, about a fantasy world where the youth take on an adventure as a rite of passage. The lead character dresses in a suit like our real world and wants to prove it (our real world) exists. Kindt is a more than reliable talent, and so this was a nice new project to discover.

Favorite Movie:

Obviously the release of new movies has been compromised this year so far. Early on I got to indulge in the fact that Colin Farrell is my favorite actor when he appeared in Guy Ritchie’s new movie, The Gentlemen, a gangster ensemble flick with a fun conversational framework. Farrell ended up acclaimed for his supporting role as a surprisingly fierce ordinary neighborhood coach. The same day, the first and only visit to a theater so far this year (though I’ve caught up with a few more 2020 movies via the archaic DVD technology), I was able to catch my previous favorite actor’s cinematic comeback, Jim Carrey in Sonic the Hedgehog. Obviously he’s great in it, absolute classic form.

Favorite TV Show (New):

Star Trek: Picard (I’m a Star Trek guy, okay?), an elegiac, ambitious reprise for a beloved character (or two or three or four or five) last seen nearly twenty years ago.

Favorite TV Show (Old):

Folks, I discovered Letterkenny. And folks, I absolutely adore Letterkenny. Honestly, I was interested in it at all because Pat Dilloway saw it and hated it, and I was naturally curious. Sorry, Pat. It’s brilliant.

Favorite Music:

Honestly, my music consumption has deteriorated over the years. I don’t blame the new music. At the start of the pandemic I saw the Strokes had a new album called The New Abnormal. Still working my way into it. Seemed eminently relevant even though it was a total coincidence. Otherwise I cycle through older stuff. 

So what does the rest of the year have going for it?

Writing Projects:

 I don’t want to jinx them talking about them here. I’m starting to feel like Grant Morrison, who talks about some of his projects maybe too ridiculously early sometimes. There’s one that probably will never happen now I still check in on hoping in vain for updates. At times I’ve written about projects here that I’m really excited about...but don’t exactly get actually working on. So I’m going to be more cautious about that. But I will be working on things!

Books:

This is easy to project. For most of the year I’ve been ignoring my reading shelves by skipping ahead to more recent acquisitions. But I’m finally working on those shelves again! I’m going to be reading a lot of Thomas Pynchon soon. I love Pynchon, so this is quite exciting for me.

And...the rest will play out. Hopefully happily! But I have to be okay when it doesn’t. Always a process.

Books into TV shows

 In classic Hollywood if a book was going to be adapted, it was for the film industry (or radio). There wasn’t really a question about it. When “prestige television” became a thing about twenty years back, it opened up a new avenue. There had been, some forty years ago, the concept of miniseries, such as The Thorn Birds or Roots, but regular TV stuck with regular TV concepts. Then HBO started leaning heavily into original programming, and the stakes were raised. Today it’s as easy to find a book adapted into a movie as a TV show.

The only streaming service I have is because I’m a Star Trek guy, and since I don’t have cable and I finally broke my network viewing habit (I used to very easily have something to be excited about every night), my discovery of new shows has become more limited than I might’ve previously imagined. Recently, though, I’ve been watching a lot of shows adapted from books.

I just finished the first season of Get Shorty. Based on the book by Elmore Leonard (and previously adapted as a John Travolta movie), by the end of the season you can kind of guess that it was inspired in part by Breaking Bad, a show about a guy who becomes a gangster somewhat accidentally. Admittedly, a large part of what broke my TV habit was the spate of shows everyone admired that I found deplorable. I see nothing worth liking about Walter White. The more critics embraced antiheroes who were probably straight-up villains, the less interested I became in the results. But Chris O’Dowd, in the final episode of Get Shorty’s first season, is literally looking at the camera as it dawns on him that his scheme to escape gangster life by becoming a movie producer has...completely backfired.

The whole season has shown how inextricably the process played out. There’s no mystery, no ambiguity, no pretensions that he started out with the best of intentions but somehow ended up in a position he could never have imagined. He suffers no illusions, his best friend has fewer scruples but actually seems more innocent, and his family, for whom he too is attempting to do this, is lost to him in quick order.

Anyway, so it’s an interesting show. The highlight is an apparent dimwit actor who’s unexpectedly brilliant while performing, a revelation that comes late in the season, a subplot that’s mostly in the background, never especially emphasized (except with a random flashback). It epitomizes the rich possibilities of this version of the story, which uses different characters but the same basic premise as the book and the movie. (We get one nod to the original lead character, Chili Palmer, who arrives at the movie studio at one point just ahead of our actual cast, just the back of Palmer’s car and his last name being used.)

I enjoyed HBO’s Watchmen, a sequel to the original comic. I adored Catch-22 with George Clooney. Good Omens was a hoot (all three of these were miniseries, admittedly). BBC’s Dirk Gently was pretty great, a show that lasted two seasons. It’s based on a couple of books (and an incomplete one) by Douglas Adams. 

Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is currently being developed by Netflix. Attempts have been made for years to get an adaptation done. This is one of the great comic books, a true literary marvel that incorporates...everything imaginable into its plot (Morpheus, the King of Dreams, has been imprisoned for years, only to discover freeing himself results in confronting everything he did before). If approached even remotely for the scale it deserves, the Netflix version would necessarily be something quite special as well.

Admittedly with my Space Corps stories, with the lead one anyway (Seven Thunders), I was always envisioning movie adaptations. The bulk of them, though, were actually outlined as TV seasons, even though I’ve been working on reverse-engineering them for book format (ha!), which has meant removing overly episodic elements (I’m a Star Trek guy; that what I had to work with, okay?). The funny thing about these recent TV shows is that they basically function as extended movies. The much-discussed Snyder Cut of Justice League is basically going to function as a miniseries in this fashion, four hours cut up into segments. Even Star Trek: Picard was described by producers as a nine hour movie, which has apparently become the way these things are routinely talked up.

TV has come a long way. It becomes easier to create cinematic experiences, at least cosmetically, and the storytelling draws established movie actors. Films then become a medium of compact art. (Almost like a really good TV episode.)

I wonder if any of this affects how books are written. You can’t really say that a TV show is necessary to capture all the beloved details of a book, since shows like Get Shorty can reinvent them anyway, and besides, if you wanted all the details of the book, you already have the book. Different mediums ought to produce different results. Will publishers seeking TV adaptations (this is easy to see with comic books, where a creator will lean heavily into a concept without bothering to develop it, because the movie version will do it for them) look for ways that will streamline the process?

We’ll see!

A Journal of the Pandemic #7

Well, the toilet paper apocalypse, at the very least, is subsiding.

It’s not true everywhere, of course. There’s still places I go where the shelves are empty, but not everywhere. It’s becoming routine to find toilet paper again. Yay humanity! The greater problems are still out there. The pandemic, for instance. We’re at the point where some people desperately want things to return to normal(ish), and there are people who respond, “No way, idiots!” So civil discourse is about the same as it’s always been. Comforting? I guess?

I‘ve backed off Facebook. I was checking it obsessively. For a while, kept trying to come up with funny things to say. People in general are going back to normal there. Again, this does not mean normal is returning or will return anytime soon, but it’s good to see.

After admitting last week that I stopped eating breakfast, I of course started eating breakfast again. Found another new peanut butter cereal, so of course am having that now.

I was pretty productive last week. I edited or looked at some projects I’d been working on previously. Squire’s History of Oz looks good. Found I had actually pretty much finished Modern Woe, the latest collection of poems (if by “latest” you allow me to mean material written literally a decade ago). That’s a project that was kind of disrupted before the pandemic, thank you. I’ve had an interesting past six months. I’ve had an interesting last year, and I’m coming ever closer to a year without my niece, and am still trying to make sense of that.

I started outlines for two last Space Corps books. Space Corps is the largest project I have ever worked on, and the thing I still hope to hang my legacy on (but who can control these things?), and I’ve spent years developing these outlines. These last two, I’ve been slow to work on them, but again, a lot has changed over the years, and I work at a different pace. But it finally seemed like the right thing, to use this time to work on them. I mean, I personally would consider myself an idiot if I didn’t.

The family continues to merrily converge for a video-chat game night on weekends, and even though I’m still not playing along, I’m glad it’s happening. This is how COVID-19 will be remembered, in the grand scheme. I have nothing but deep sympathies for those who have suffered, but for a lot of us it’s a moment that’s giving us a huge opportunity, and it’s good to see it being embraced, however it may look.

I mentioned, I think, the Colorado friend with the anthology he wants to do, and it occurred to me that the story I’m working on now (Pat is being driven crazy by its inability to stay on track with the vampire thing) will be as appropriate as anything to give him for it. I’m really proud of this one.

Now, if I could just get some reassurance that I won’t have to wear a mask when I go back to work...

Collider, Jupiter's Beard, the avalanche of poetry

The last time I checked in I quickly glossed on the avalanche of poetry I'm working on.  Well, I made some progress, further compiling and then just yesterday finding some additional collections, pushing the total number of volumes...quite high.  I don't often think of myself as a poet, but I've...written a lot of poems over the years, and every time quite passionately.  So it's weird that I don't think of myself as a poet.  I guess it's harder to be a poet without recognition than it is a novelist.

Speaking of that, Jupiter's Beard, in the title, is the retitled Kiss Me Quick, and it's something I'm still very much working toward. 

Collider, meanwhile, is another project I'm working on.  In fact, it's the oldest project I've worked on...ever, really, and the one I've never even come close to actually writing.  It's part of the Space Corps sequence, and as indicated, the first one I ever worked on, beginning plotting way back in 1995 (and probably earlier).  I've continuously revised outlines, streamlining and making it more sophisticated.  I've reached the point where I finally need to write the thing.

Part of the motivation is that it will be a more straightforward story than Seven Thunders.  You may or may not recall that Seven Thunders was the passion project for Space Corps, something I finally wrote about five years back and have been timidly submitting ever since ("timidly" here meaning sporadically), including on my birthday about a month ago.  Got a form rejection for it recently.  Decided that wasn't going to be the end of the story.  Seven Thunders is a heavily complex story.  Collider, as I've said, as I've worked away at it, is simpler, more naturally geared toward specific story beats that flow organically.  And this week, I began working on yet another plot revision, further streamlining it.  Some of that was made possible by Terrestrial Affairs, the novella that wasn't supposed to feature Collider material but did, which makes both stories better for it, hopefully.

And maybe I can get the damn thing accepted by a publisher.

Appearing in a new anthology just released.

It's always nice to report being published in something I didn't myself put together.  5 Totems is the second anthology edited by Scott Quine (after WriteClubCo, named for the writing group it sprang from) to feature my work.  Here's the Amazon listing for the paperback.

Scott's one of the nicest people I've ever known, and the best boss I've ever had.  The thing anyone knows about him is his abiding love for Chuck Palahniuk, and maybe most people he knows know he looks like Paul Rudd.  His father, Dennis Quine, also appears in the anthology, and I can begin to understand Scott's obsession with UFO radio shows based on the little I've discovered about Dennis recently. 

(I can't say I know Bruce Kooken or Robert Davis, but if Scott vouches for them, they've got to be okay, too.)

I've got six stories in the book, including a Space Corps story I've been itching to write for years.  Actually, the version in the book is an abbreviated take on the one I originally wrote, but Dennis found it confusing, so I tried one that was a little more straightforward.  Dennis read through all my stories, and I rewrote another one ("Nothere") based on his feedback.  It was interesting, that process.  Made the experience seem professional.  The Space Corps story used to be incorporated into two separate books in the saga (outlines, as they have yet to be written), but it seemed prudent to extract the material, put it in its own context.  In a lot of ways, that brought me back to how I used to write Star Trek stories, which was the first fiction of any kind I wrote outside of school projects.  If for some reason you end up actually reading the anthology, the story I'm referring to is "Rue the Day."

A few of the stories have been reclaimed from projects fizzled out with other people over the years, so it was good becoming reacquainted with them and seeing them appear, finally, somewhere.  One of those ("Ajax"), I honestly can't recall the original project, but it was fun to reread, and to remember I could write something like that.  Apparently I have a label for one of them (The Tarnished Age); that story's called "Unsafe at Any Speed."  All I had to do with that previously collaborative landscape was rename the city and a hero from the project's creator.

So, again, thanks to Scott for making this happen, and I hope you'll have a look.

Spoiling for a new project

Obviously I don't check in here terribly often.  I've been trying to figure out what my next project will be.  I completed, recently, a few screw-around projects that had been sitting around for far too long, and that was itself a nice slate-clearing.  The IWSG has a contest with the entry date coming up soon, and I wanted to write something for that, and even started writing it, and maybe will even finish writing it, who knows?  There was another contest I found out about, and thought about taking the IWSG story and using some of its elements for that, but...I didn't really want to deal with the prospect of winning that one, which was extremely unsettling to realize.  I mean, I want to be discovered.  I want to make a living writing stories.  But this contest...Aside from an obscenely generous cash prize, it expected the winner to make a lot of publicity appearances.  Talk about your insecurities...I didn't really envision myself as the kind of person they'd be interested in using for those appearances.  But what do I know?

Anyway, I've been writing comic book scripts regularly again for the past few years, short samples, which has kind of gotten me back into that groove for the first time in a decade.  Recently I found a couple artists who expressed interest in drawing up some of these scripts.  Who knows what will come of it, but I figured I'd document it.

Found out today that the agent involved in the IWSG twitter pitch thing hasn't had a chance to read any of the queries from that event, yet.  So there's always a chance, right?  Seven Thunders still has a chance!  But we'll see, right? 

My latest project may be a Seven Thunders spin-off, actually, another short story set in Space Corps, which is itself always a little thrilling, knowing I'm actually writing Space Corps material, after dreaming about it for so long...

I keep wondering how much of my struggle is because it was always going to be a struggle, and how much because of the way I've approached it.  They say persistence is always the key.  But what does persistence look like?  Obviously I've maintained this blog for five years, but apart from all the self-published material I've put out in that time (!), I haven't really made that much progress.  Persistence as in relentless?  Yeah, not so much.  I lack that kind of drive, and my relationship with the world always seems to be at least passively aggressive.  Writers ought to be in conflict with the world, to a certain extent, but it also seems as if some of them can get away with it better than others.  Recently I've been in a great deal of conflict.  I find myself wondering all over again how it is I could have reached a point where I have no meaningful connections, no one who truly understands me.

Woe is me.  Alas, poor Yorick.  We all end up as skulls, eventually.  What's to worry about?  All the minor tortures, really.  Try, try to keep perspective...

Seven Thunders on Wattpad

I just finished serializing Seven Thunders on Wattpad.  (You can read it here.)

I made it available this way mostly because I'm still uncomfortable about self-publishing it, even though I've since done so for a Space Corps novella (Terrestrial Affairs).  Obviously I've self-published a lot of stuff.  So what's the deal?

I started serializing Seven Thunders back in January (apparently; seems like a long time ago now!), posting chapters about once a week (sometimes more, like this week), taking the time to edit them as I went.  The editing was really the big achievement here.  If you've read one of my self-published books, you'll know that.  I fixed things, and I took things out, and I added a thing here and there, and hopefully generally made the story better than when I started the process.

Seven Thunders is important to me, as the story I've dedicated the most time to, and spent the most time developing, and anticipating the most and being most significant in a backdrop (Space Corps) that I have spent even more time working on over the years.  I've written about it before and chances are I'll write about it again, if I ever decide what to do with it.

Seems in some respects by posting it on Wattpad I made my options shrink, because publishers consider Wattpad as a publishing venue, regardless of how many views you get there.  Yet I found that I had to do something with it, because Seven Thunders had become almost too precious to me.  (Again, anyone who's actually read my self-published books will scratch their heads trying to figure out how that's even possible.)  I needed to find some perspective on it. 

Writing other Space Corps stories, of varying lengths, over the years has helped.  Some of them I posted to my writing blog (Sigild V), and some of them have appeared in various anthologies (and in Terrestrial Affairs).  Just getting Space Corps itself out there is a kind of relief.  But having Seven Thunders itself, which I originally wrote in 2012-2013, be seen is entirely different.  This one's the most personal, this one I've invested everything in.  That sort of thing.

And now it's all there.  Waiting to be judged.  Or not.  I just entered it into Wattpad's "Wattys" competition, where it has a chance to be awarded one of several honors that may not may not help find readers.  At this point I have a little over 200 views across individual chapters, most of them for the first one.  Heavy readership on Wattpad is in the thousands.  I'm nowhere near close.  As far as Wattpad is concerned, Seven Thunders still barely exists. 

It's scary and exhilarating at the same time.  You always want to believe lucky breaks are possible, even though they're one-in-a-million.  What if, right?  But it's out there.  It's finally out there.  That's what it's really about...

Terrestrial Affairs is free...until Wednesday

Thought I should mention that the Terrestrial Affairs giveaways haven't ended.  The ebook is free thru Wednesday, if you'd like to have yourself a nice and easy look at it.  Be sure to review it at Amazon and/or Goodreads if you do!

Space Corps...just putting it out there...

So anyone who has visited this blog recently knows that Terrestrial Affairs has been released, and that it's a Space Corps story.  I've got a Space Corps label where you can trace back every time I've mentioned it previously, and you can see without even looking at all that material that I've talked plenty about it.  A few years back, on another of my blogs, I spent a whole A-to-Z April exploring different characters and stories from the Space Corps saga, and that was well before I really had anything available to read.  Earlier this year I wrote a Space Corps story for the IWSG anthology contest, and it wasn't selected, but it kicked off a renewed sense of interest in finally getting Space Corps out in the open.

So I did something pretty radical.  I finally started using my Wattpad account, which I set up years ago, and began posting edited chapters of Seven Thunders.  (You can read them here.)  I finished the manuscript four years ago, and it's been sitting in a computer file, because I didn't know what to do with it.  This was the story I'd wanted to write since 1998.  It sat percolating for years, and in the meantime I started writing other novel-length stories, sort of figuring out what that was like.  I tried getting a number of them published, had no luck, and then started self-publishing them.  Then I lost all faith, basically, in my ability to be published traditionally, but I didn't want Seven Thunders to be dumped unceremoniously in anonymity, like the rest of my self-published material.  I suck at blogger networking.  I admit that.  I started blogging well before all the cool bloggers you read and/or are ever considered blogging.  But I blogged back then like I did anything else I wrote, which was just for the fun of it.  It wasn't until much later that I even thought visitors could be a real thing, when I randomly started getting comments about stuff I said about TV shows.  Then I found a community, and they were all writers, and they all supported each other and...

Well, I didn't really fit in.  Everyone I connected with, they didn't much care about how blogging was "supposed" to work, either, or we parted ways eventually, and so I never got that bump that everyone else in the community seemed to. 

But that's not really here nor there.  The point is, I got past that.  I started editing, and posting, Seven Thunders.  It's been interesting.  If I were to write Seven Thunders today, it would probably look a lot different.  Recently I've written a lot of much shorter works.  Seven Thunders was written when I had come across a formula for works of a certain length, and that was always my goal, and somehow I always hit it, one way or another.  But it always felt vaguely stifling, creatively.  The more I worked the shorter lengths, the more I saw the creative potential in that.  I'm not saying I don't stand by Seven Thunders, today.  Hey, I'm posting the thing once a week, over at Wattpad.  And I'm not saying the shorter works I've been doing are inherently better.  I'd like them to be longer.  Until Terrestrial Affairs I had gradually been pushing them to be longer.  Terrestrial Affairs, which I'm perfectly happy with, thank you, ended up being the length it is because I had a very short window in which to write it, and I was able to finish it in that window, but I didn't have a lot of time to punch it up to greater length, which meant I had to go with my first creative impulses, which is not something I normally like to do.  But again, it worked with Terrestrial Affairs, especially when I realized how the previously unrelated Wendale sequence fit into it.

I wasn't particularly updating this blog when I developed Wendale, so there isn't anything to see here about it, but I was mulling it through last summer, last fall, and on into winter, three seasons of development, evolution, only to discover what it really was, something embedded in something else, in the spring.  And while I had envisioned Wendale to be more like the Miss Simon stories I was doing last year, I'm actually happy that I was able to do that style but in a genre context as well, because that was what I'd been thinking through that period, too, but I couldn't quite decide how to do it.

I have no idea how interested anyone will be in Space Corps.  I have no idea if Terrestrial Affairs will be anymore successful than the other stuff I've self-published.  I have no idea if Seven Thunders will find an audience on Wattpad.  But I'm starting to not care.  Space Corps began on notebook pages, stuff I obsessively chronicled, for myself, because I wanted to see where the story would go.  Now, it seems to be looking around the public sector.  But nothing about it has changed, really.  I'm okay with that.

Terrestrial Affairs giveaway

To celebrate the release of Terrestrial Affairs, I'm doing a giveaway at Amazon, with three winners to be determined in about a week.  You can enter here.

Terrestrial Affairs is the first standalone Space Corps story I've published.  It functions equally well (hopefully) as a standalone story and as an introduction to Space Corps lore.  While writing it I realized that it neatly dovetails with another story in the saga, as it explains why a character in Collider dies.  (Collider is just one of the many other stories already plotted in the greater saga.  You can have a look at more of the shape of the saga here.)

If you choose to enter, good luck!

Terrestrial Affairs now available

So I've got a new novella out.  As you can see (and might have read in the title of this post), it's called Terrestrial Affairs, and it's a Space Corps story.  This is significant, because I've been working on Space Corps as a storytelling concepts for, well, decades now, but it's taken me a while to start producing material for it, material that you don't have to look under a rock to find.  So on one level, that's what Terrestrial Affairs is, a short work that helps me explore Space Corps' actual potential, and helps readers potentially discover it.

But it's a good story, too (hopefully).  It concerns the emissary of an alien invasion suffering a catastrophic systems failure in his ship, which leads to a crash-landing.  He all but falls to earth in the backyard of an isolated young woman.  Immediately, the authorities come sniffing, both among humans and the alien's own boss.  So it becomes a thorny situation, and to make matters more complicated, the young woman kind of falls instantly in love with the alien, and...

Well, anyway, I think it's a pretty good story.  It also includes a subplot of the story I actually set out to write, which had been intended to be entirely unrelated to genre storytelling, the various offspring of a rotten man, all with different mothers, converging on a town called Wendale.  When I was writing Terrestrial Affairs, I realized Wendale fit right in.  It becomes a story the young woman tells, and then sort of becomes the coda of Terrestrial Affairs itself.

Kind of the thing that most interested me about this project was that I made an effort to make a real cover.  Not just a template that used elements I wouldn't have otherwise included, but creative choices I made deliberately, all the way around.  It'll at least look pretty, in other words. 

I also include a brief sketch of the complete Space Corps saga, plus two short stories I'd written for my WriteClubCo group over in Colorado Springs, efforts that helped make this particular story a reality in a roundabout way, when I was beginning to give myself permission to let Space Corps loose in the world.

If you're interested, you can find paperback and ebook editions for purchase.