A Journal of the Pandemic #17

So, the pandemic is still happening.

Last week at work was kind of a grind. A few people were on vacation, so I worked more hours. I still don’t get why the first and loudest response to COVID-19 wasn’t to shut down nonessential interstate travel. I’ve had multiple coworkers travel out of state in the past three months, and none of them has had to quarantine upon returning. This is literally how it spreads, folks. It’s pointless to try and contain it from person to person six feet apart when someone from, I don’t know, Boise can take their filthy Idaho potatoes to Maine (we grow them, too!) just because they want to visit someone there, and bring COVID-19 along with them, completely asymptotic. But, and not to keep making the same point over and over again, but the political points some people are determined to make over this (it doesn’t matter which side) keep hammering the same points but ignoring the greater problems. 

This is all kind of ironic because at the beginning of the pandemic I was pretty mad about having to cancel the birthday party reunion. Apparently we can’t have anything nice. If we could have been bothered to put in place reasonable restrictions with reasonable measures and reasonable demonstrations on how to actually pull them off, instead of what we actually got, all of this would have been a lot easier.

On Thursday I had my first Zoom experience. Since it wasn’t a cast reunion thing it did not make the news cycle, although that would have been a lot more fun. (The cast of Competition Piece back together! Although sadly would’ve been incomplete with the death of the lead actor earlier this year.) It was the annual suicide prevention course. But it kind of reminded me all over again how everyone in my life has taken for granted that the one dude living alone is just sort of busting it out. I’m okay on my own, I really am. Most of the time. But last week was another rough patch. I wish being social weren’t seen as inherently reciprocal. 

On the other hand, I had a great phone call with my dad last Sunday. It involved a lot of reminiscing. I don’t know if he had a particular need for it at the time or if that’s just the way the conversation went. As with any family stories I’d heard a lot of it before. Some of it seemed new! I liked that. At one point, though, he talked about one of the dogs in his past without mentioning the name, where in the past he’d always used it. It was a momentary hiccup, and maybe didn’t mean anything. The weird thing is that I’ve always had a hard time remembering the dog’s name, but am pretty sure I have it (Duke, which became easier to remember when I made the connection to John Wayne, who was my dad’s favorite actor) locked in now, so it was, I guess, disappointing, if anything, not to get that affirmation that I’m right about that.

Anyway, my WriteClubCo buddy last night said he was scrapping the anthology I sent him seven stories over the course of the last few months for inclusion. (Sending those stories provoked me into leaving my pandemic comfort zone, which has otherwise shrank back some things I’ve been doing that theoretically have nothing to do with socializing. Far less blogging, recently, for instance.) It’s the most I’d sent him in the three anthologies he worked on putting together. It’s disappointing, because I hate submitting my material. I don’t have a great track record of publication outside doing it myself due to feeling, well, rejected by rejection, so I saw the guy as a reliable outlet. He instead is moving forward with another project. I have to fight the instinct to question why he’s abandoning the project outright, but then small market publishers implode randomly all the time. They have far less incentive to be professional. I was a part of it once myself. Someone decides they want to walk away and the whole thing collapses. 

Part of why last week was hard was exactly because not only did I work more hours, but just when I was getting around to feeling motivated to write again, and even settled on a new project, I suddenly had to readjust all over again. Recently I’ve had a lot of free time that felt almost embarrassing, and it was consistently in the morning, and then I went back to an early shift, and that required adjusting, and...

So I guess this stupid pandemic experience has begun to be sort of consistently frustrating at this point. Not in a medical capacity, or in being caught up in one of the many tangential crises (unless you’re still participating in protests, there really wasn’t something new last month, which was a first; but of course those protesters somehow provoked a federal response, which surprised them, but probably no one who was surprised their protests were somehow still happening despite no one talking about them until the federal response), but in the act of just trying to figure out “the new normal.” 

So perhaps as a result, I ordered a bunch of stuff, again, recently, just like old pandemic times...

(I don’t actually have a grudge against Idaho and their filthy, filthy potatoes. But yeah, Maine has better potatoes.)

A Journal of the Pandemic #11

I guess I kind of waited for this latest week to be over to write another update.  Work was weird.  We went back to the one-on-one-off schedule, although technically a version of that was supposed to happen last week except instead of working two days I worked all five for a number of reasons, although by the end of the week I was quite okay with that, as I got to work with a baby who as it turned out made some excellent progress in the month or so since I'd last seen her.  What's frustrating about that is that from the little feedback I was able to get from other coworkers (we're working single-ratio and so not really working with each other these days), the same fog that tends to penetrate perceptions still claims this particular baby, a "problem" baby in that she craves a certain level of security.  I never understand why this is so hard to grasp.  This week I saw a version of this difficulty play out with another baby (part of an adorable set of twins I was particularly anxious to see again!) who cried at unfamiliar faces.  Both twins were unusually stranger-danger prone, but that's kind of to be expected in these unusual times, right?  Except this coworker (who, to be clear, was not the same one as mentioned earlier) went out of their way not to help her feel at ease.  A huge part of the problem anyone, parents, caregivers, seems to face is the irrational approach to "problem" kids.  If it's a simple solution (putting in the effort to make them feel comfortable) it's almost as if that's the worst possible suggestion to these people.  If it's a difficult solution (dealing with truly problematic behavior) it's as if the automatic response is to give in to the behavior, which only ever enforces it and makes it more difficult to handle, both for those caving in to the behavior and those left dealing with the results...

Anyway, so out of four work days this week (Monday was Memorial Day, for those either unfamiliar with American holidays or still adrift in the sea of days), on this one-on-one-off schedule, I actually worked...two days!  And it turned out to harder than working every day.  When you work in an environment where your coworkers can't be counted on to perform adequately (which can literally be any environment and is therefore every environment), it's tough relying on others, bad enough when you have to work alongside them, worse when you're left picking up the strange (at best) pieces they leave behind.  That was this week. 

I guess part of it was that in getting those days off this week, it began to remind me of how strange these pandemic days really are.  When it was the month sitting at home, at least then I could adjust on my own terms, and didn't need to react to whatever anyone was doing (even on social media I've been getting more fed up recently, possibly because hysteria is returning to the news cycle, one way or another, and this never plays out well on social media).  Now it's an attempt to continue those strange listless days and incorporate the demands of work, sporadically, back in.  And it's difficult, especially when on my days off I expected to be called in, as happened last week, although it caused more anxiety at the end of a shift than waiting in the morning to receive word.  I talked briefly with a dad last week about this kind of uncertainty.  Even though he'd spent the last month working every day, he suggested knowing he was working every day was probably easier.

I got in one of the masks I'd ordered, and it was...not worth having ordered.  Again, I got masks before I went back to work, locally, Pat, so I no longer needed those masks, and thank goodness!  I know at least one of the two remaining masks arriving in the mail at some point will be equally worthless, because it was from the same company.  I didn't like the elastic ear loops anyway, so I'm glad one of them instantly detached.  How does anyone wear that style??? The local ones are all cloth and are not at all a bother to wear, except if you're breathing heavily and wearing glasses and...But what're the chances of that?  I figure it'll be worth having these worthless masks anyway, as a souvenir of the pandemic era.  I seriously doubt Americans are going to be wearing masks indefinitely, no matter how long it persists in the relative future.

I sent along two more stories to my WriteClubCo pal in Colorado, including one I wrote inspired by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett's Good Omens, the TV adaptation of which I was finally watching when Gaiman's Twitter account reminded me the book was now thirty years old.  On Twitter if you're a creator you constantly retweet every reference to your work, or so seems to be the case with everyone I follow.  Gaiman kept doing that until the unfortunate business of his split with Amanda Palmer.

Anyway, I finished my Marvel Girl: Like A Phoenix comics script project over at Sigild, and while Pat was not amused it accomplished everything I wanted it to.  (That's two projects in a row Pat didn't like.  Oh well.)  I didn't want to write a particularly long script project this time.  I came up with more material for Marvel Girl than I actually used (I only realized last night that I never revisited one particular character I introduced, and if one were to find a plot hole that character would be it, but then I realized, I said so little about them I could easily change what they were supposed to be and it wouldn't affect anything at all, or actually improve the whole thing to do so), a lot of character concepts that were originals but whose roles would only have diverted from the plot or needlessly extended it.  Anyway, it's always fun to work on something.

In other news, I might finally begin transcribing the manuscript for In the Land of Pangaea, which I wrote and printed out at work five or so years back and so one paper copy is all I have of it.  I learned of a contest a few days back but have no time to credibly write something new, so I might tackle the transcription project with one of Pangaea's three acts.  The first and third acts are the ones I'm constantly wondering about anyway, the second the one I've consistently been most pleased about, and the one I wrote most about here back then.  With Marvel Girl done and less interest in wasting time on social media, I think I'm ready to tackle more ambitious material at last.

Finally, the way this week worked out, I started with a three-day weekend and now ending it with one.  I hope to use that time wisely.  Hopping onto a wifi connection always helps, rare as it is these pandemic days.  Now to go leave some rare comments on other people's blogs...

A Journal of the Pandemic #9

Today I worked a few hours for the first time in a month, and it was a breeze. I had finally gotten some masks on Friday, suspecting that they would be required at the childcare center, and of course they were. I know at this point it’s completely normal to see people wearing them, but until today I honestly hadn’t done it myself yet. But coming from Maine, where it’s sometimes quite necessary to wear some kind of facial covering during winter, I had the kind of experience necessary to figure out how to wear the mask and still, y’know, breathe...

Last week I spent more time on Twitter. I know previously I was complaining about Twitter, but the thing about me is that just because I’m complaining about something doesn’t mean I want it to disappear from the face of the earth (I say it this way because I used to work on stories where there were literally “fly nullifiers” in use, which is all the more alarming given my family’s “Floyd the Fly” legacy my niece has recently learned about, and instantly became the subject of my 2020 Christmas poem, the package for which I wrote already and am debating whether I should send ridiculously early, perhaps as part of a general birthday/baby shower/pandemic gift box, as my niece is going to be a big sister in the fall). (I write long parenthetical phrases.) (Just so you know.)

I had finished the longish short story I had been working on last Sunday, and decided to submit it, and a few other stories, and decided to write a few more for, to my Colorado friend’s new anthology, previously detailed as WriteClubCo. Funny enough, but the same movie (The Gentlemen) that I was watching early in the year when I figured out how to write one story ended up inspiring a different story. It’s the movie that keeps on giving!

I looked at another of the poetry collections and started putting it into shape. Potentially libraries will be opening again soon, so this avalanche of material is going to start flowing. Obviously things are starting to open, and that bothers some people and it’s a relief to others, and the two sides see the issue the same way Hulk Hogan’s hair regards his skull.

I started another daily writing project, another comic book script, this time involving Marvel characters rather than DC. This method of writing a single script page at a time is a very relaxing strategy, and I already know pretty much everything I need to know about the story, but little revelations are always occurring to me and improving the results.

I think I used the time away from work well. And hopefully I can keep the momentum going...

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.

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.

Barbarian Translation - The Trojan War release

Mouldwarp Press Presents #3 Barbarian Translation - The Trojan War has now been released. 

To give you a refresher course on it, this is, as the title suggests, the third volume in my Mouldwarp Press Presents anthology series, and yes, it features variations on the classic tale of the Trojan War.  Featured is my WriteClubCo colleague Christy Wiabel, who also had a story in the first volume, Project Mayhem, and a new story from me.

I'm particularly excited to present this story, because I love the Trojan War (clearly), and I've been wanting to tell a version of the Troilus & Cressida romance for years.  Plus, I recently came up with a shiny new storytelling device, the character of Miss Simon, who will probably be the narrator for a number of novels I will be writing in the future.  This was her pilot episode, so to speak, her secret origin.

My third anthology is being processed...

The third Mouldwarp Press Presents anthology has been submitted to CreateSpace and will be available shortly.  After the relative flood of submissions to the first volume, I haven't had nearly as much luck with subsequent ones.  This will be the second consecutive one to feature two stories, with one of them being mine.  The good news is that both of them featured return contributors from the first volume, and Barbarian Translation - The Trojan War will feature a story from one of my good friends from WriteClubCo, Christy Wiabel, one of those genuinely good people that're so hard to find. 

MPP exists at all because I wanted to make good with my own past experiences with anthology startups.  If there's another volume, I'll attempt to finally publish stories meant for the aborted effort that was the direct genesis for this venture.  If that doesn't happen, I'm more than happy with the results I've had.  Mouldwarp Press is a fake publishing company.  On the surface, it operates much the way indy publishers tend to, existing as a vehicle for the originating writer's own work, plus anthologies that feature more of their work, and a few of their friends as well (and assorted stragglers gullible enough to sign up for such schemes).  (That's been my experience, anyway.)  The truth is, "Mouldwarp Press" is a label I've been slapping on books I publish via CreateSpace and Kindle, and the Mouldwarp Press Presents anthologies have been of the same kind.

I don't know if I originally believed that they might become something more, but the fact is they didn't.  I'm truly sorry if anyone got involved with them believing otherwise.  Being a writer is not an easy calling.  And it is a calling.  The journey is the best part, the process of writing itself.  The destination?  More than in any other activity you might pursue, the destination is an open question all the way to the end.  Because, there is no end.  The history of storytelling is replete with examples.

Somewhere along the course of my journey, I ended up blogging in a community that didn't always seem to share my goals.  My passion?  Sure.  But the expectations were something else.  This post is not an admission of defeat, concession, or apology (except for the one above).  It's an acknowledgment, without judgment (hey, sometimes even I can get around to that), that sometimes all things aren't equal because they aren't.

What this is saying is that for once, I will say something here and feel comfortable knowing that it might be the last thing someone reads about my journey.  I'm switching gears.  I've always got projects in the pipeline, things I want to accomplish, but this is an end to what can sometimes feel like a competition.  I didn't come here, I didn't start this, to convince you to like me.  If you're reading this at all, thank you.

There's always more...

Song Remains the Same release

The second volume from my Mouldwarp Press Presents anthology series has been released, in paperback and Kindle editions.

Included is the first publication of my Tim Laflamme stories, a character also featured in my In the Land of Pangaea manuscript and The Pond War project, who will also be the focus of two short tales to be included in the WriteClubCo anthology to appear at some future date.

The other story is from David Perlmutter, who previously contributed to "Project Mayhem," the first volume in the series.  Perlmutter is incredibly prolific and has landed an incredible number of stories in various anthologies.  

The Submissions page has been updated with information about the next anthology, "Barbarian Translation," which focuses on variations of The Iliad.

IWSG December 2014

The Insecure Writers Support Group released the book it had members help create.  You can read about that here.

I'll use this meeting to wrap-up my year in writing.  Technically I made horrendous progress in my attempt to make people pay me for writing.  I sold virtually no books and publishers were as usual completely uninterested in me and my inadequate attempts to convince them to think otherwise.  I released a book in February and the one person who read it hated it.  I mean hated it.  Can I emphasize that any more?  Hated it!!!

So, as far as my ego went in 2014, it probably has a number of bruises still looking to heal up.

But the thing is, I think this was an incredibly crucial year.  I worked on a number of projects and had some breakthroughs that could very well lead to that golden future I aspire to.  Yay me and all that.  I'm not even just about talking my fiction.  One of the biggest projects of several big projects I tackled this year came at the very start, something I finished after starting a year ago this month, a complete Bible commentary, something I hadn't even intended to do when I decided to finally read the Bible all the way through for the first time.  I'm thinking of releasing that as a book.  If any significant readership materialized for it, I'd probably have to talk myself out of a lot of controversy, but I'm okay with that.  I more than okay.  I'm at a point in my life where I need to start asserting myself.

The Star Wars project was a personal triumph and came with great creative fulfillment, and that's as much as any writer should ever really hope to expect.  I think the more I pushed to finish it before the end of the year the harder I made it for the few readers who cared to continue doing so.  That's okay.  The "comic strip" I'm wrapping up soon went the same way.  Early in the year I had a wealth of support, but it vanished the longer it went on.  But for me, it represents closure, having finally figured out the full shape of a story I've been trying to tell since high school.

I finished writing a very long novel in the early months, and then tackled the start of a very short one in the closing ones.  (Maybe I'll still finish the draft of that one before the end of the year.  It doesn't matter.  Circumstances I won't discuss here drastically affected the shape of the whole year, and my ability to continue writing as I normally would.)

And various insights on old projects as well the conceiving of new projects entirely.

But I should stress that 2014 also walloped me good!  One anthology that would've been the culmination of a writing group filled with people I knew in another lifetime vanished.  Another seems destined, officially, to go nowhere.  The last of three comic book biography scripts has been spinning wheels looking an artist for more than a year now.  I failed completely in a writing contest, not even being selected to enter the voting rounds.  And I know with absolute certainty that if I expect anyone to randomly find my books on their own, much less like them, I can probably sell myself a bridge, too (but don't worry, it's a nice one with historic value and a whole ode dedicated to it by the poet Hart Crane).

Maybe next year I'll have better things to report...

Musings of a savage detective

I'm currently reading Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives, which is a fictional account of the late author's own literary life experiences.  Bolano died a decade ago this year, but it wasn't until about four years back, with the publication of his masterpiece 2666, that I took notice of him, and the Chilean writer subsequently became my all-time favorite novelist (supplanting Herman Melville, no less).

Bolano spent most of his time as a novelist musing on his own experiences, much as aspiring writers are always told to "write what they know."  He considered himself first and foremost a poet, and it was in this mischievous form that he existed for the events depicted in Savage Detectives, the tenuous heart of a whole movement that never really happened although still accomplished its goal of being honest about itself, which was the whole point.

It's gotten me thinking about a number of things, both about my own experiences in literary communities and how I tend to write my own stories, if I indeed "write what I know."

As far as communities go, I've never quite been a Bolano, but to a certain extent maybe I have, if not quite a charismatic center then certainly the enigmatic figure who drifts in and out of writing circles.  In college I was part of the poetry scene that coalesced around a couple of acquaintances who stumbled into some of the same classes together, which eventually led to the short-lived Hemlock literary journal.  Since I wasn't part of the inner circle of that group, more like the narrator of the opening section of Savage Detectives, I would never be able to give a truly definitive account of those days, but it's still nice to look back on.

The Hemlock experience was something I enjoyed quite a bit, which led to the abortive Dead Letter Quarterly several years later, the product of acquaintances from a comic book site I wrote at for awhile, which led to the more successful Project Mayhem anthology I put together for my budding Mouldwarp Press imprint (if you're interested, you can still consider contributing to a follow-up).

In recent days the idea of a writing community has shifted to blogging buddies such as yourself and even former coworkers.

Part of what's made this such a roundabout experience for me is that I spent all my budding years as a writer not actually writing.  In middle and high school, I developed my tools for world-building rather than writing, I guess believing that knowing a story is the first stage to writing it.  By the time I started writing stories in earnest it took my some time to integrate the world-building, but at least gave me time to work on my storytelling.  I knew I was a writer before I did any serious writing, which is perhaps why I exist much as Bolano did, as a literary romantic, and don't necessarily view it the same way that others of my ilk tend to, as something they do rather than something they are.  I tend to shout at the opposition like Bolano, and this can sometimes make it hard to find kindred souls (people don't generally liked to be shouted at for some reason), whether or not they exist at all.

As far as writing trends go, I'm different from Bolano in that I don't tend toward extrapolations of my own experiences in the same literal sense so much as drawing from elements.  For Modern Ark I imposed my relationship with my sister on a vampire story.  In the current Pangaea plans, I've been modifying characters to be a bit more like Bolano, although the framework remains very much my own.  All my stories are reflections from my perspective and aims for literature.  Where Bolano tended to look at the world from an intimate vantage point, I lean toward expansive, which opens for more fantastical opportunities, although he's a writer who shares my need to represent myself in a more obvious way (once you know it's there) than I find in others, although certainly in some like Melville it's clearly there and adds layers of depth to the storytelling and for me defines what being a true writer is all about.

Alfred Hitchcock had a thing for the ladies...

In related news, I'm in another WriteClub.  This one is different from DL Hammons' WRiTE CLUB in that it is spelled differently, plus its full title is WriteClubCo, which is the first indication that it's a local affair, meaning that I interact with people instead of computer monitors ("Co" is the grammatically incorrect abbreviation of Colorado).

The club is all but a reunion of former Borders coworkers.  We had our first meeting in years last night, and much of it was spent simply catching up.  Only a few of us were there in the final days of the store we all worked at together (in Colorado Springs, the Southgate location, on the off chance you might care about such details).  Scott Quine, the general manager at the time I originally started working at this location (I originated at Borders when Burlington, MA, got its store in 2006), put the club together, something he'd begun elsewhere, which was how Lorraine Wright became a part of it.  (I still remember when Lorraine transferred to the store, the first one since me.  I guess I felt my gimmick had been infringed.)

Also present last night besides Scott and Lorraine were Christy Koffman Smith (whose tenure at Borders was complicated because she worked as the vendor representative of Paperchase, and the company made this difficult in its final years) and Kelsey Kramer, who knows weird veterinarian terms.  Lorraine brought her husband along, plus pictures of her cats, and stories about her ferrets!

It was fun getting some of the band back together.  I had only participated in the club once before, during which Christy memorably read a story about buttons.  Thanks to "Project Mayhem" (still accepting submissions!) I've had a chance to catch up with her creatively, and even got a preview of the story she read last night, which I've been encouraging her to expand into a novel.

It's funny, because most of the meeting was spent talking about things other than writing, which I actually think was a good thing.  As us bloggers know, talking about writing can be perfectly fine and certainly encouraging, but if that's all you talk about, it can be limiting.  After all, a writer isn't just someone who writes but who observes.

For my part, I read a story based on the Space Corps, part of my continuing effort to begin writing more Space Corps rather than simply plotting out the saga.  Last year I made more progress on that front than at any other point in my writing history besides 2002 (with bleeds into 2001 and 2003), when I wrote, or attempted to write, the foundation myth of the Galactic Alliance, where the excerpt "Quagmire" comes from that's featured in Monorama (my Facebook page for the collection is up to 22 people who "like" it, including a bunch of random individuals who may or may not have been confused by its title to believe it's something other than what it is).  I wrote several short stories last year, including "Warship" and "Who Killed Iron Joe?," both of which can be found at Sigild V, my writing blog, plus began writing Seven Thunders.  The story I read last night, "George Jackman and the Monastery of Burnside," ties into both Seven Thunders and the greater Space Corps saga, as it reveals certain details in a moment in time for both Lance Nolan (star of Seven Thunders) and Lord Phan (who is featured in "Quagmire" and several other points in the saga).

This year I will be finishing Seven Thunders and shopping it around, plus writing "Darkness Falls on a Dark Land," which explains a little more about the foundation myth of the Galactic Alliance (it'll be serialized at Sigild), as well as at least begin writing The Dark Side of Space, the second volume of the Space Corps saga and prequel to Seven Thunders.  If I indeed finish Dark Side of Space, I'll be reaching completely unfamiliar territory for me, since the next three books will at least in theory be far longer than anything else I've written.

It was interesting reading "George Jackman," because along with all the talk I've been doing here and the few stories over at Sigild, this is the biggest public exposure of Space Corps to date.  A decade ago, when I wrote the abortive story behind "Quagmire," I kept most of the details of the saga close to the vest.  Of course,a decade ago key elements of the saga had yet to coalesce, and in fact that story had a big hand in shaping what it would become.  Like George Lucas, I believe that a sprawling space saga needs specific points on which to rotate, otherwise it's just a bunch of random stories.  That's what Seven Thunders as the first book is meant to address, and why even an apparent throwaway tale like "George Jackman" needs to address important elements, and why "Who Killed Iron Joe?" explains the origins of another key character in Seven Thunders (and why I was both sad and happy recently when a tiny publisher rejected it for an upcoming anthology).

The title of this post, meanwhile, refers to the fact that I am currently in the midst of watching an Alfred Hitchcock DVD collection.  As the two films based on Hitchcock himself that were released last year suggest, he was indeed fond of the ladies, but what I've taken away so far is that his films do in fact put them in very prominent positions, even if sometime the camera leers at them the way Hitchcock himself apparently did.  It's a way of saying that the themes that define us are hard to get away from.  WriteClubCo reminds me (and hopefully you) that I was part of a similarly named club last year.  Much of my experience with other writers has been in environments like this, though previously only in school.  I don't do workshops.  Workshops are for writers who haven't discovered their voice.  If I haven't discovered mine yet, then I am a failure.  Maybe workshops also help with connections, and maybe I should take them more seriously because of that, because I have few enough writing connections.  WriteClubCo is one of mine, and I intend to value it.

I also have what's quickly amounting to a writing history, which at the moment I'm defining by Space Corps, which is long in coming, because I've been making a go of these stories in theory since 1995.  That's a long time gestating!  I'm also attempting to get Modern Ark (previously known as Finnegan) off the ground.  I just wrote a new prologue, "Before Finnegan Wakes" (thus alluding to part of the reason why I've decided to change its title, just so no one is confused about whether or not I'm calling to mind James Joyce), which can be found at Sigild.  I still strongly believe in Modern Ark, even though it may be something of a conceptual nightmare for some.  I recently went on a binge watching Tarsem's The Fall, which has been a favorite of mine since its release.  It's a personal work of great brilliance, yet it's a movie that you truly have to follow in order to appreciate, steeped in a very specific mythology.  Modern Ark is a little like that.  Actually, quite a bit like that.  And the other problem of waiting to see Modern Ark published is that Minor Contracts can perhaps best be appreciated in relation to it.  Even though it's mostly a story of Adam & Eve (and Cain, and Abel), there's a good chunk of it that also challenges the reader to rethink their relationship with religion, which is part of what Modern Ark is about, when it isn't about vampires (in the sense of Stoker, not Meyer).

If you've actually read all of this, thank you and congratulations.  I suppose it's another way of restating my goals for 2013, plus being thankful that I have some people I know personally who may very well be rooting for me.