Putting It Out There (Again)

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

Well, stranger things have certainly happened.

A Journal of the Pandemic #28

 So, got some interesting news yesterday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nine Panel Grid, Gracie, World Famous...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nine Panel Grid begins

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aronnax, completed

I just finished writing the twelfth and final chapter Aronnax.

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

But I’m pretty happy with it.

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

Hopefully something worthwhile.

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

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

Aronnax (2.0)

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

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

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

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

Should be interesting.

A Journal of the Pandemic #27

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life is strange; life continues.