The Future Epiphany

Readers of this blog know that I like to listen to music.  Not so much the music that is pandered about these days, but rather the music of my youth—which is to say, strange music.  I was into a lot of things from the late 1960’s to the early 1980’s, but for a while, in the middle there, I was heavily into progressive rock.

One of the groups I listened to quite a lot was Genesis.  Foxtrot was the first album of note that I remember (because it was played on the radio), but I remember having Selling England By the Pound, and then on to Wind and Wuthering and Seconds Out, skipping The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and A Trick of the Tail.  After the various breakups I also bought And Then There Were Three . . . and Duke—

And it’s last that has me wondering what sort of things are going on in my mind.

See, back in 1979 we didn’t have an Internet.  No, don’t tell me we did:  I know what you’re trying to say, and I’m talking about an Internet I could access without having NORAD.  Chill, okay?  Back to my point . . . It was difficult, at best, to get news about certain things that we today take for granted.  Today if you want to know about albums and tours, you hop online and just about anything you want is at your Google-capable fingertips.  Back in my day, if you wanted to get the lowdown on stuff like, say, lyrics, you had to get the album and read the liner notes, or you bought a—gasp!—magazine.

I like the Duke album a lot, though I didn’t play it as much as I could as I was going to school at the time, and most of my days and nights were caught up with working and studying.  I never had the chance to see Genesis in concert, so when they were touring in support of Duke, I missed the story Phil Collins told at the start of the six-song Duke Suite:  The Story of Albert.

Today I know about this story because I’ve watched, more than a few times, the recording made at the Lyceum Ballroom, London, on 7 May, 1980.  It’s out on YouTube, so watch it if you have a couple of hours and you want to hear some historic music, and see the way people used to perform.  I’ve even heard the Story of Albert many times as well, though I didn’t feel a connection until the other day—

The story starts out, “Albert . . . was a born loser . . .” He never did anything right, he was one of life’s failures.  There was a problem, however:  “Albert fell in love with a lady:  The Duchess.”  There were problems here, though, ‘cause “The Duchess was a domineering lady:  she was into S and M.”  And this led to other problems because Albert didn’t speak Spanish, so The Duchess kicked his ass out.  Poor Albert.

So where is this going?

About the thirtieth time I’d heard this story, the light went on, and I was blinded by the following revelation:  in my story Transporting, one of the main characters is named Albert, and he is pretty much a born loser as well.  Not only that, but he meets a woman who kidnaps him and hauls his butt off to the future.  That woman is used to getting her way, because she was Cytheria, also known by her title:  The Duchess.

And once in the future, Albert couldn’t help but fall in love . . .

I didn’t begin writing Transporting until 1989, so ten years had passed between the time I put words to computer and the moments when The Story of Albert was being told in concert halls around the world.  I never saw those concerts, nor did I even know of this story until last year.

Was there some kind of connection there, my mind somehow picking up a bit of creativity floating about that decided to impart this knowledge, and make is serve as the basis for a story that was going to consume a large part of my life for the last couple of decades?  I have no idea.  But now I do wonder about how it is we come up with ideas such as mine, which seemed to have been influenced by a story I’d never heard until 2012.

Or maybe . . .

It sets up an interesting scene I want to do for a story now.  Since Cytheria and Albert can travel about in time, and since the dates of the Lyceum Ballroom concerts are so close to the time of their birthdays (I don’t even want to consider the coincidences there), they go back to stand in the crowd and hear the concert.  And when Phil gets to telling the Story of Albert, my Albert turns to his lady love and reiterates how he was a born loser, but eventually he fell in love with The Duchess . . . and Cytheria reminds him, “But you don’t know Spanish, so I’ll have to throw you out.”

And then they’ll laugh and spend the next thirty minutes holding each other as the music plays.

Sometimes I amaze myself with these things.

Onward and Backwards

Welcome to the Real World–one that isn’t 2012.  Stumbling forward towards a second year of blogging and story telling, and now I’m up to doing both this new year.

So . . . Suggestive Amusements.  Wrote yesterday, wrote this morning.  Chapter One, and I’m just a little over two thousand words into it.  It’s smooth, and the writing is going well.  I’m remembering not to use “Suddenly” to set up action; not to use “Very” as a adverb as it’s lazy and it won’t get us laid; not to start a conversation with “So”, and not to say “Truth be told”, because it’s a tired cliché.

I’m also noticing that a lot of my own feelings are popping out upon the page.

The main character is a writer–or, I should say, someone who is writing, someone who is trying to publish, someone who has a few things out in ebook format, and someone who is tired of the work they’re now doing.  Oh, sure, sounds like someone I know–sounds like a lot of people I know.

There’s something else popping out upon the page, however, and that’s some personal feelings about work.  Not just work in general, but how I felt about my last job . . .

It’s no huge secret that I hated my late position.  I hated it going in, and I didn’t like it any better as time went on, and such were my feelings that when I was told in October that my position was being eliminated, and that my services were no longer needed, it was all I could do to keep from smiling as I headed for the exit.  As the movie quote goes, “If I were half the man I was five years ago, I’d take a flamethrower to this place!”  Well, I’m more than the person I was five years ago, and it’s been a very fortunate thing that I didn’t find any flamethrowers laying about.

The thing is, as I started in on how my main character feels about his job, there was the sudden . . . whoosh of feelings, you could say.  Things about my old slave cubical came back; little nuances about how things were done in the office were remembered, and as I began to created the words needed to bring the character’s sense of ennui to the forefront, a feeling of “I’ve been here before” was dancing about me like a crazed jester.

I didn’t just hate my last job:  I loathed it with the power of a thousand hypernovas being sucked into the kill-hell galactic black hole of all galactic black holes.  That’s a lot of power:  a hypernova produces 1 x 10⁴⁶ joules of energy in photons, and that’s 2 x 10³⁶ tons of TNT.  If you want to see that number, here it is:  2000000000000000000000000000000000000 tons.  That two trillion yottatons, which is a real number.  It’s also a number so large that there is another word for it:  Foe, which is only used to measure the power of supernovas.

Now add three more zeros onto that number, and find the energy necessary to toss the whole mess into the event horizon of a super-super-super massive black hole, and watch the gamma rays fly!

That’s how much I hated my last job, and I’m feeling it when I write this chapter.

But this chapter will be over soon; maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow night.  Then I can move onto my lovely muse coming to visit my main male character–

Oh, did I say things were going to get simple?

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 17,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 4 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

How’s That Apocalypse Working For You?

If you’re reading this, you didn’t die in a massive conflagration of natural disasters that has even bored Roland Emmerich to death.  The world didn’t end at 5:11 AM Chicago time, which was when the last Mayan cycle ended, and the next began.  Nothing bad happened that wouldn’t have happened anyway, and things move forward.

Life goes on.

So does the stupidity.

It amazes me how people are so taken in by utter bullshit every day.  A few years ago it was the Rapture that was, for sure, gonna happen in 2011.  People sold off their possession, convinced they were off to meet the lord, but the only way that was going to happen is if they got personal with a Guyana Cocktail.  Before that it was the Heaven’s Gate yahoos, who at least had enough fortitude to carry through on their insanity and leave the world a little more sane.  And before that . . . hell, people, too much, because it seems like someone thinks the world is going to end at any moment, and only the faithful are going to survive–or, if nothing else, be rewarded with a trip to Heaven Land, or some such stupidity.

And you think this is the end?  Not a chance.  We have another Rapture coming up in 2015, because British Methodist theologian Adam Clarke said so, and no other than Sir Issac Newton, claimed that his studies proved that the Rapture couldn’t possibly occur before 2060, so look for the Raptors (Can I call them that without pissing off the real raptors?) to get all jiggy over that one, because, hey, Sir Issac said so!

People are a gullible lot, and the majority of them seem to be on Facebook these days.  Even today I saw another of those, “Can you believe THIS?” memes going around about there being “December 2012 will feature 5 Saturdays, 5 Sundays and 5 Mondays, a combination of days that occurs only once every 823 years,” and you better pass that along so you can make money.

Pure bullshit.

I mean, it only takes a close look at calendars, and a little common sense, to understand that the whole, “I happens once every 823 years” is total crap.  But it’s easier to believe the crap than it is to call it out as illogical claptrap.  Why?  Because of Sturgeon’s Revelation, I suppose.  Harlan Ellison suggested that the Revelation applied to people as well, and in the forty-five years since reading that, I’ve seen little to suggest otherwise.

It’s far better, it would also seem, to just make fun of the lunacy of the event, rather than tell people who appear to even the smallest belief that the End is Nigh, that they are crazy and should either get their head straight, or to keep their insanity to themselves–or, better yet, get help for their delusion.  Because you aren’t helping anyone by professing your opinion that the end of the world is coming, and we gotta get ready.  You’re a problem, and it would be best if you leave us alone.

Oh, is that too mean?  Just ask a “prepper” if I’m wrong, and they’ll tell you I’m the crazy one.  They’ll tell you the end if coming, and you need lots of things:  clothes, food, guns . . . lots of guns.

Just ask Nancy Lanza how that worked out for her.

At Home With the Insane

Lets get this out of the way right now:  I have mental illness.

I was in therapy at ten because I was lonely, frightened, depressed, and didn’t like the company of others.  Well, there were a few reasons leading to that, but part of my problem is that I was bi-polar.  My therapist then was starting to get to the root of things, then my parents pulled me out of there because, one, they didn’t see improvements, and two, they thought the woman who was working with me was putting “strange ideas” in my head.

Let me tell you, she didn’t have to:  there were plenty of strange ideas there already.

I had friends when I was in school, but not a lot.  I started smoking pot in 1972, and drinking a couple of years later.  These days the behavior is called “self medication”; back then it was just getting high.  And I did it quite a lot.  Mostly because it felt good, mostly because it kept whatever demons were chasing my ass away.  I had my books and I had my music, but I also had my “medication”.

There were some incidences of bullying in school, but nothing really physical.  It was all mental, all designed to wear you down and break you.  At the end of the day, when I walked home from school–because after a while I was afraid to take the bus, and I didn’t want to be with other kids–I’d sometimes find a moment, while alone in the woods, to cry a bit.  I did that often, and it bothered my parents when they saw it happen, so I only allowed myself the chance to do this when I was by myself, and there was no chance of being discovered.

There was a place where we used to get our drugs, and sometimes even our booze.  The home was owned by a husband and wife, with the husband’s brother living with them as well, and they seemed to be able to get their hands on just about any kind of drug you wanted.  For the most part I was interested in pot, but they let it be known that they could get their hands on just about anything . . .

And not just drugs, either.

There was one time when a friend and I stopped over to see them, to buy a bag, and the brother wanted to show me the latest acquisition–which were not drugs.  I didn’t get a full tally of what they had, but I do remember four M-16′s, a couple of boxes of grenades, and . . .

See, the story they were giving us was they’d knocked over a National Guard armory a few nights before, which may or may not have been true.   This was 1973, Vietnam was winding down, and who the hell knew what was being kept in some of these places?  In all likelihood they’d traded a lot of kilos of drugs for weapons, but since I knew these guys were a bit crazy themselves, it was just as likely they’d knocked over an armory.

But lets get to the payoff, the item hinted upon.  The brother opened up as case and said, “Hey, I got twenty kilos of C-4.  I’ll let you have it for $250:  I’ll even throw in the detonators and det cord.”

So lets review:  a guy I knew was offering to sell me about forty-five pounds of high explosives, along with the means to use it, all for $250.  Which I happened to have.

I said no, because . . . well, what was I going to do with twenty kilos of C-4?

Let me also state this:  I was very smart and very imaginative back then.  I was also pissed off and scared and upset a lot as well, and for a few weeks after that incident my fevered little mind thought up all sorts of shit that I could have done with that sort of stash.  The only reason I didn’t?  Stephen King put into words many years later:  ”If you take yourself out, you’re a hero.  If you take out others when you take yourself out, you’re chickenshit.”  I hated myself, and a few other people, and if I really wanted to get back at those I hated, I’d get after them, and that would be that.  Anyone else who’d get caught in your madness would just notch you a little higher on the Chickenshit of the Year list.

I won’t say the thoughts of revenge and getting evenness vanished after that time.  Oh, no.  They aren’t there as much any more, but they still show up from time to time.  These days I chalk up thoughts like that as “Research”, because you never know when you’ll need to know, like I did in 1991, how to bring down a very tall office building–say, 125 to 150 stories–with everyone inside.  I spent a few days looking over the office building I worked in at the time, and understood that, if you have the right tools, it’s not that hard.

I did that because I needed a scene for a game I was running.

I don’t act upon any of these ideas–which are research, remember, because I do write; you should see the really bad ones–because I’m not that crazy.  I’m bi-polar, but I can tell the difference between right and wrong, and as ignorant as I have believed most of my co-workers to be from time to time, I’d never do something that would eventually see me labeled as a “disgruntled worker”.  (Does this mean there’s a grunted worker?)  As an atheist I long ago created my moral compass, and have worked at doing the right things because they are right.

Taking out others just because you’re nuts and pissed off at the world is the wrong thing to do.

Probably is, a lot of people don’t have the same moral clarity as I.

If you are mentally ill, getting help is damn near impossible in the U.S..  You are stigmatized because you have a “problem” that you can’t “handle”, and if you just “sucked it up”, you’ll work through it.  That was what I was taught as a kid; it was bullshit then, and it’s bullshit now.  It is easier to get access to treatment these days, particularly if you work for a large company, but that’s only come about after more than a few large companies have had their offices shot up by disgruntled workers, and they’d had to go through the hassle of hiring new people.

That was how I got treatment.  The company I was working for had a program, and I basically had to tell my manager I was loosing my shit, and bad things were going to happen if I didn’t get help.  They told me to call the help line to set something up, and then let me go home for the day.  Let me repeat that:  I professed to suicidal behavior, and they had me call a help line, and then sent me home.  Now, I did get in to see a counselor a few days later, and while she was a great person, she couldn’t get me medication.  The only person who could do that was a psychiatrist, but it might be weeks before I could get in and see one of those.  She told me the easiest thing to do was go to the local ER, tell them I was suicidal, then have myself checked into a facility for forty-eight hours–at which point I could get on meds.  Oh, and lets point out:  she couldn’t commit, even with my permission.  I had to do it myself.

That was how I was able to get on medication to help me with my bi-polar disorder, and all it really took was . . . maybe two weeks of speaking to, or seeing, different people.

Good thing I wasn’t having any serious problems.

You wanna have a discussion?  Lets talk about why we have the worst system for mental health this side of the old Soviet Union.  Lets talk about why if you need help, it’s a culture of “Go see them; I can’t do anymore for you”.  Lets talk about why people are vilified and made to think they are even worse than they are if they profess to being sad, or depressed, or if they feel like they have no choice but to hurt themselves.  Lets talk about why we have so many people with mental health issues in the first place, brought about by stress, by over-work, by being made to feel that if they are LBGT they are scum and should probably die anyway.

Lets talk about why it is every time someone who is mentally unbalanced, who isn’t getting help, flips the hell right out and does something horrific, we act so surprised that something like that can happen here.  Lets talk about the idiots who, upon hearing about said horrific thing carried out by the mentally unbalanced, believe the one thing that will fix this problem is arming everyone . . .

Those of you who think that last is the end-all solution to everything, there’s this thing called “Cause and Effect”.  You fix the cause, the effect becomes diminished.  It does work.  Reaction to the effect does little good, because you didn’t prevent the effect from occurring.  That is what the kids these days call Epic Fail.

There needs to be dialog.  There needs to be discussion.  Without discussion there are no solutions.

Without solutions there is no future.

Mayhem Most Marvelous

Two chapters to go in Replacements, and it’s surprising how easy it’s been to reach this point.  It’s helped a lot that the last couple of chapters have been very easy to edit, with only the need to change a few things, and adding a phrase here and there.  It’s easy to see that when I wrote this on the first pass, I knew what I wanted to say in these later chapters than I did in the first.

But then I had a better idea of where I wanted the story to go by the time I’d finished the first couple of chapters.  It only makes sense that when I reached then last three chapters, I didn’t have to think about what I was going to write–I only needed it written.

In working this last chapter tonight, I realize that I should do something to the story.  There’s an event that happens at the end, and it takes place in something five paragraphs.  Which makes me wonder:  can a truly horrible event be summed up in under a hundred words?

Why not?

The event that happens, while needed, is not that important that if you never saw it happen, the omission would ruin everything.  If anything, the short scene–the whole chapter is about fourteen hundred words–shows how the person who’s become Olivia will do just about anything to get her way, and while she may feel sorry about what she did, that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t do it again.

In a way, the character who is Olivia is something of a psycho.  She’s kicking ass and burning bridges left and right, and what pisses her off is not the possibility that one may have picked up something strange about her–it’s that she’s enjoying her new role as department head and secret mistress, and woe be to anyone who steps on the toes of her Ferragamos.

I may have given it some thought in the past, but Olivia is probably one of the most screwed up characters I’ve ever done.  She’s not crazy in a Hannibal Lecter way, but once she figures out that she can do pretty much as he pleases, she talks about screwed people up as calmly as she would discuss what sort of polish to use for her pedicure.

When I used to run my World of Darkness Vampire game, there was one character who used to put in an appearance in just about everyone’s game, because when it came to the World of the Undead in Chicago, she was right at the top of the heap of room-temperature bodies.

She was old, powerful, and sometimes referred to as the person who was the historical Helen of Troy.  Since she was so old and powerful, people liked to play her in a very over the top manner, with a lot of histrionics, and beating of breasts.  She was this Amazonian vampire Wonder Woman who no one in their mind would ever cross, because she would hold out your maybe-beating heart for you to see if she was of that mood.

Naturally, I had her show up for a few secessions.  When the players meet her, what do they get?  A very short woman, about five foot without heels, somewhat dark, olive tone skin, black hair, dark eyes, and a physique that might lead you to believe she could lift her body weight–if she were lucky.

This was the same character, the old vampire killer to end all killers.  And she looked like you wouldn’t notice her twice if you ran into her at a local Micky-Ds.

I was questioned about why she looked the way she did.  I was able to justify her appearance on that fact that if she really were from Greece, circa 1,000 BCE, then the whole idea of having a six foot tall plus woman running about the city was ludicrous.  Skin tone, hair, eyes–pretty much the standard for the area.  If she’d been a real lady before turning bloodsucker, then manual labor was totally out of the question, and she probably wouldn’t have had a lot of toning or muscular definition.

But when she–well, I, since I was playing here–spoke, she was calm, has great manners  never once raised her voice or threw a tantrum.  I was ready for that, too.  ”If you’re a poseur badass,” I explained, “you have to constantly show everyone so they don’t forever.  If you’re a true badass, though . . . you never have to show anyone what you can do.  They just know.”

And . . . they’re never bothered if they have to kill everyone in a room if they don’t get the first lesson.  You should have known, you dumb shits, that you don’t mess with Death in High Heels . . .

That’s the way Olivia is shaping up.  Killing people is just a thing, and if it’s gonna be done, then get it done.  She’s turning into a sweet badass without having to tip her hand to everyone.

She’s pretty sweet.  I should write more like her.

 

Deep in the Underwhelmed

Day Three of the New Position, and I’m noticing something:  I’m in possession of a singular lack of imagination of late.  I have a drive to and from home that takes a bit of time, but unlike the trips to The Undisclosed Location, I seemed to have no time to think about what I could be working upon.

I find this just a little troubling, because this was one of the things that helped me through my time when I was doing that other job (if by “other job”, you mean some soul-sucking creature that demanded you kneel in brain-dead supplication, then yes, you’re correct).  Constantly working on ideas in my mind was what kept me more or less sane.

Now, it seems as if this has vanished.

I’m of the opinion that this is short lived, as on the drive home last night I came up with something that I thought would show a deeper connection between Olivia and Martha in my story Replacements.  Something even alluded to as I was performing my edits of Chapter 6 last night.  It’s there, it’s becoming a real thing—

It’s just that I’m feeling a bit underwhelmed at the moment.

This is, as they say, one of those things.  I’m starting something new, something that is keeping me away from home for eleven hours in a day.  Then I return, eat, and try to manage my writing time at the computer.  I get in a chapter a night for editing—what I’m doing now—and when I start on a new work in progress, I’ll try and keep to my goal of a thousand, or more, words a night.

This doesn’t leave me a lot of time to do other things when I return for the evening.  Yes, I did the same when I was off to the Job in the Hole, but this feels somewhat different.  I’m unable to put my finger on the issue, but I know it’s there—

Or so I think.

This morning I saw the follow quote floating about on Facebook:

 

“Sometimes I feel so stupid and dull and uncreative that I am amazed when people tell me differently.”  Sylvia Plath

I’ve suffered through the same feeling time and again.  I’ll look at something I’m working on and shake my head, because I’m convincing myself that I’m wasting my time working on crap.  And then I’ll let someone look at what I’m working on, and there are good vibes all around.  It’s an amazing thing, because I then have to shake the feeling that these people are somehow wrong.

This once happened with The Muse.  I was working on something, didn’t like what I was doing, let her see it—and she get deep into my nether regions over the fact that I didn’t agree with her opinion.  Ugly thing, an angry Muse; good thing she was wearing flats that day.

The point to be made is that, as writers, we hold ourselves up to an impossible standard at times, and we’re always our own worst critics.  We have to know when to push ourselves to get something out, but we always have to understand when we need to lower the bar and stop worrying about how shitty we’ve become.

The happy medium is there, somewhere.

I’ll probably find it on a drive home some night . . . maybe tonight.

Replacement Therapy

We move into the evening, and enter the part of the performance where I’m feeling like I’m about to drop dead on my feet.  Maybe that’s just the tired talking.  Probably.  But I’ll get this post out before I crash, just so I can post it to the waiting masses–that’s you–later.

But there has been writing this evening, more or less.  Replacements has been and ongoing work, and I’m about half way through it, and looking at the possibility of adding another chapter.  Not right now, thought, which is the nice thing about Scrivener:  you can set up the card, continue on doing something else, and come back to it when you feel like working on that part.  If you don’t need it, though, just delete the card and move on with the rest of the story.

Right now I think I need the chapter.  I’m still thinking, and I’ll have a better guess about things after I do the edit on Chapter Six tomorrow.

For a story that I didn’t have feel for, it’s suddenly taken off.  Tonight I added one hundred ninety-nine words; last night I added about one hundred and forty to it.  I’ve been adding things here and there to make things just a touch clearer, and rewriting things that were way too clumsy when I did the first draft.  If this goes on I’ll probably end up with about fourteen thousand words without a new chapter; add that to the mix, and I’ll easily top fifteen thousand.

I can’t say for certain what’s happened, but the story seems to have a new life–or maybe the writer does.  Before I was completely bummed to look at it, now I’m thinking about what could happen with it to make it better.  What I’m doing now it the clean-up; the next pass through will, I hope, strengthen the story even more.

One of the things I’m considering is putting back in a scene that I was originally told not to write.  The advice I was given at the time was, “You’re going to trigger someone,” so it’s probably not going to stretch your imagination as to what I was considering.  (Hint:  it’s cheesecake.  Lots of cheesecake.  Actually, I just had an idea for the new chapter . . .)  I may put that in; I may just edit the chapter as is, then add another note card in Scrivener and rewrite the chapter with the idea.

It’s not going to hurt me to do so, you know?

It’s funny how I was so down on this just a week or two before, and now I’m cruising through the story.  It could be that NaNo had me down, because I went over some of my blogging from last year at this time, and I wasn’t in the best of moods, either.  Writing a novel in thirty days can do strange things to you, and given my current schedule, I’d be very hard pressed to crank out two thousand words a night next year.

But I’m not going to start thinking about what I’m going to write next year, as some people are already doing.  I have projects I want to develop, but getting something for NaNo isn’t on the table right now.  It’s like all the talk about the next election in 2016:  we just got over this last one, how’s about giving that shit a break, ‘kay?

I’ll see what pops up in the morning.  For all I know I’ll have a strange dream and I’ll suddenly want to write about how I look in purple–

Yeah, like that’s never happened before.

The Vision of the Beguiled

Of late I’ve been rising very early.  Is this a return to my old habits, or is it that I don’t need that much sleep any more?  I don’t know–but I was sleepy for about an hour yesterday afternoon, a drowsiness that vanished about four PM.  I don’t want to find myself heading back into the cycle of work and exhaustion that I ran through over the summer.  That needs to end right now, and in a big way.

The mind was working overtime when I woke up, however.  There was a song in my head that shouldn’t have been there, and visions that I should have ignored.  This seemed to happen as well, probably because my brain is trying to pull me away from whatever dreams I had that were, in all honesty, crappy enough that they would have bummed me out in the long run.

Then I wake up, get on Facebook, and am greeted by another in a long line of post that indicate you are indeed a manly man if you wear a kilt.  I’ve even seen posts that say you’d never see a gay man wearing a kilt, which leads to me believe that somewhere on the Internet there is a picture of John Barrowman in a kilt–oh, look:  ask, and the Internet provides!  So much for gay men in kilts . . .

It’s the time of year for visions to be upheld, for things to be viewed through a dark lens of remembered that isn’t always that clean.  This time of month is when everyone goes on about holidays of the past, gathering with family, sitting around the tree and enjoying the kidlettes ripping up all those carefully prepared packages, then running off to their rooms for the next few hours while dinner is being readied.

I want to say I had a lot of memories like this, but I don’t.  Oh, I spent my time around the tree, getting presents.  I also remember getting yelled at a few times because I didn’t seem “appreciative” enough for what I got, and there was one time when I was yelled at for almost an hour to write a thank you note to my grandmother for sending me two dollars in a card.  Good times, yo.

I know you might find this strange, but the only really good Christmas memory I have as a kid was the broadcast from the moon by Apollo 8.  I didn’t listen much to what was being said–particularly the whole “reading of Genesis” thing, which I didn’t need under any conditions–because I was watching the landscape being filmed.  That was what drew me in:  not the words, but the vision.

We spend way too much time thinking of the past and using that to drive our present.  Where we fall down is there’s no vision for what’s to come.  I tell my daughter, “Do something that will make you happy, not what’s going to make you the most money,” and I mean it, because there is a singular lack of people following their dreams these days.  Seems like most people are scrambling to pay bills and get shit for the holidays that will be looked at, come March, with an expression similar to, “Why the hell did I need this?”  Or someone will look at that iPhone they received from Santa and thing, “Fuck this:  I need a new Android!” thereby proving that gifts of this nature are usually bullshit.

I don’t think about gifts this time of year, because I’m as generous as get out for 364 days of the year (365 this year, yeah!).  If someone needs something, I get it.  There was a time when Christmas wasn’t about some kid being born (which, in reality, he wasn’t–not at this time of the year at least, but don’t let that spoil the fun . . .), but more about lighting bonfires and making lots of noise because you thought if you didn’t, the Wild Hunt was coming for your ass.  Yule was a blow out party, celebrating getting through another year in one piece, and you decorated trees–not ones that were cut down, but those things that grow in something called a forest–to give your thanks to nature not dropping a Storm From Hell on you and your family, or infesting you with the Black Death.

Set a vision for yourself.  Go with it.  Make that your gift, not just to yourself, but to the world.  Maybe it won’t pay off right away, or even ever, but you owe it to yourself to do.  I saw the moon when I was eleven years old, and I wanted to go there.  I couldn’t in real life, but I could in my imagination.  It’s taken a while, but I’ve gone there, gone to other worlds, gone to other dimensions.  I don’t think about getting something for the holidays, because for me, it’s just another day.

Work your vision.

If you don’t, who will?

Now Leaving the Darkness

This is a strange day in history.  On this day Pope Innocent VIII started the biggest witch hunt in history in Europe; Columbus ended up in Haiti; Jefferson Davis was elected to the US Senate, and eventually went on to bigger and, um, better things; The Great London Smog of 1952 started and eventually killed 12,000 people; Sukarno expelled all Dutch people from Indonesia.

Fritz Lang and Walt Disney were born, and if only those two could have done a film together.  Werner Heiesbenberg was also born, thus being able to lend his name to great meth chemists everywhere.  Finally we have Strom Thurmond, who always seemed to find ways to elevate racism to a new level.

Something else happened.  One year ago I set off on an interview for a job, an odyssey that wasn’t nearly the same as one that had taken place ten years before, but eventually ended up in tears all the same.

This eventually became known as the Trip to the Undisclosed Location, and my experience at The Hole.  I wrote about this many times, and for those who have followed this blog, you know that it was a period of darkness for me.  There was some fantastic enlightenment, yes, and a bit of writing, but for the most part I hated the experience with a fervor few can imagine.

Notice I’m using the past tense when saying, “Experience.”  That’s because, for a while now–about two months–the Undisclosed Location ceased to be my reality.

It was really a very simple matter.  I was told my position was being eliminated, and as such I could pack up my shit and leave.  There was no shock there; things had happening throughout the summer, with people leaving in a hurry, either on their own, or . . . not.  In one case, we had someone in our group send out an email late on a Tuesday night saying the coming Friday was going to be her last day, then after Friday was set up to be the day she’d meet with people to hand over projects, she called in sick.  All this without telling anyone where she was going.

I didn’t get upset when I was told to go.  In fact, I didn’t care.  I knew there would be a few hardships, but beyond that I just wanted the hell out of there.  In fact, they let me walk out on my own, which could have been a disaster–but I’m not the sort who would do anything that might lead to jail time.  No place is worth that.  My only regret is that I didn’t take advantage of the fact that as I took the elevator alone, with the HR director standing outside the door watching me leave, I didn’t yell out, “My Anus is Bleeding!” after the doors closed.

The kicker to this all?  One year after I interviewed for The Hole–on a day that had me humming, “Cold and misty morning, I heard a warning born in the air”–I have a new job.  I secured the position yesterday.  It’s a contract position, one that will last a year, which I’m happy about, because it allows me to keep doing what I’m doing with my writing.  I have four or five weeks to go before Harper Voyager gets/doesn’t get back to me, so fingers are still crossed.

But the writing goes on.  Always move forward.  Continue being the best girl I can be.

Oh, one other things happened today:  Flight 19 disappeared.  It’s was fitting tribute to what happened to me, because I feel as if I spent my time in some Bermuda Triangle, and emerged triumphant.

But, really:  no hard feelings to The Undisclosed Location.  I met a few very good people–it’s unfortunate that only one or two of them were my co-workers.  As uninspiring and boring as my last job was, as unfriendly and standoffish as the majority of my co-workers were, I don’t hold any ill-will towards them.  Not at all.

It’s a bright day today.  The weather is warm.

It’s a good day to do something.

I think I’ll write.

Modelingrific

Ah, the weekend.  That transitional period where you go from one miserable week to another, usually stressed out from catching up on all the stuff you didn’t get to do during the week.  Mine are like that from time to time, and then there are moments when it’s all about relaxing and playing with something new.

First off, there was this writing thing I do, and what I was going to do next.  I thought and thought and thought–okay, maybe I only thought a little, but drama, people–we gotta have it.  I’ve decided that my story Replacements, which I wrote for consumption on another site, is a good little project to edit, then format, for self-publishing.  The last thing I had published was back in May, and I should get something else out and up before the end of the year.

Since Replacements isn’t a novel in search of a home, or something that’s a continuation of one of a couple of series that are ongoing, it’s made a good candidate for finding a home at Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, as well a some points in-between.  It’s also twelve thousand words, so there’s room to expand the story, maybe go into a little more detail on some areas–like how the new Olivia fell into her role as mistress–and not blow this up into another novel.

It seems to be the best way to go:  editing, with a little rewriting, as well as getting something new out in the end.  All for the low price of $2.99!

But wait!  There’s more!

I’ve been playing with some 3D modeling programs the last week.  Blender has been one, Hexagon has been the other.  Mostly I’ve been playing with things in Hexagon, which is an easy program for one to learn the basics, then trying to create the same things in Blender, which is far more powerful a program, but–as everyone tells me–has a extensive learning curve.

One of the things I’ve played with is modeling space ships–in particular, one I ran for a game called Diaspora.  The ship my players “owned” was named The Divine Comedy, and the idea was to make the ship look as “realistic” as possible.  I knew what I wanted it to look like, but all I had, up until now, were sketches and a few notes.

But now, I have this:

What do we have here?  Up front you have the main docking port.  The big round thing is a centrifuge, and inside are modules that change position depending on which way “Down” is for any given moment–meaning, if the drive is burning, down is towards the back towards the engine, and if they are coasting, down is towards the short, outer wall of the centrifuge casing.  On top you have the comm tower.  There are two cargo doors between the centrifuge and the radiators–those wings on either side of the ship, which are used to get rid of heat.  On the girders you have the fuel tanks, then a large and thin shadow shield to keep pesky radiation away from the crew.  Then you have the reactor, and the engine nozzle.  Not how we often think of space ships in science fiction, but this is a lot closer to reality than anything you will see on television, or in the movies.

After that, I wanted to try my hand at something else from another story idea.  It’s sort of a alternate history/future history that could end up being very Rocketpunkish (you can look that up here), and one that’s been bouncing about for a few months.  One of the key moments in the story is involves the construction of a very large space station which acts as a transfer station to the Moon and points beyond, and what my characters do to make this happen.

What does this station–which I have imaginatively named Station One for now–look like once it’s built?  Like this:

It’s a huge assembly.  From one docking center to the other, it’s 210 meters long, or 688 feet if you’re not into the whole metric thing (even though you should be), and from one set of solar panels to the other it’s 170 meters, or 558 feet high.  This thing would need a couple of football stadiums to sit inside, and even then it’d pop out of whatever sort of roof you have over those joints.

At the one end are a couple of very rough models of ships that I’d use in the story.  At the center, before the solar panel towers, are four living modules, each one 38 meters high by 16 meters in diameter, set upon a centrifuge producing .3g gravity.  About the only thing missing are circular tunnels that allow people to walk from one module to the other without needing to climb up to the center, then head down to another module.

To give you a sense of scale, there is something below the station that looks like a fat goose flying in formation.  That’s Skylab, the one and only.  As big as it was, it’s miniscule compared to what I’m thinking of creating in my story.  Actually, one of the ideas in my story is that Skylab is saved and used as a work shack for the people putting Station One together–at least until they can get large living modules in place.

One of the things that’s nice about doing this sort of thing is being able to take a vision you have for something that could end up in a story, and give it a sort of physical presence.  Yes, it’s still fantasy, but now it’s a fantasy that one day may just show up as an illustration inside a story.

Just give me time, ’cause neither of us knows where this is going.

That’s always fun.

Roundabout Gibberish

Nothing starts off your day like waking up to the memories of dealing with idiots from the night before.

Let me tell you, I have this idea for a movie:  Thirty Going on 13!  The story of a woman who doesn’t work and still lives with her mother, and apparently hasn’t had an original idea in her head for most of her life, who likes to take to social media to throw out random shit with this hope it will stick among the few friends she has, and who–upon the moment someone dare question her incredible assertions–begins screaming that she’s being ATTACKED, and that you’re MEAN, and finally, she tells you she doesn’t have to tell you ANYTHING about why she believes what she says she does, I don’t want to talk to you any more, you’re always mean–

And then deletes her entire, foaming at the mouth, oh-I’m-sorry-I-called-you-a-lazy-government-soaking-bum-which-isn’t-the-same-as-me-’cause-I-still-live-at-home-with-mommy-forgive-me-I-say-bad-things-when-I-get-angry, batshit insane tirade of a post, because once it’s down The Memory Hole, it never existed, right?

Good thing they’re a writer (I should put that in quotes, but that’s being mean), ’cause that just means they’ll have time to work on getting that drinking at 8 AM routine, so they can damn everyone else who has done something worthwhile and pass out at three in the afternoon, secure in their knowledge that once they scamper back to the computer at 10 PM, they can get on and Post While Shitfaced, and find the few friends that remain who do enjoy listing to her Crazy Cat Lady polemic.

Seriously, there are enough negative vibrations floating about my life that I should know better than to get suckered into hair-pulling scree that are the 21^st Century equivalent of standing upon a soap box in the local park, and going on about the mind control chemicals hidden in fluidized water, and if you continue allowing your children to drink said water, eventually they’ll turn into teenagers and–Gasp!–start talking back to you!  Facebook should have a button that says, “I’m Now Writing On Toilet Paper With Crayons!”, which would warn some of us that we aren’t going to engage with people who are interested in honest debate–we are dealing with fools who piss themselves at the slightest disturbance of their sheltered lives.

Enough.  Time to move on.

Well, almost . . . the problem here is one that Isaac Asimov pointed out some time ago.  Let him speak his case in his own words:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”.

I am nowhere near The Good Doctor’s intellectual equal.  I do my best to stay informed, find out what’s being said on both side of the issue, and make up my mind using the available facts.  I may not always be on the correct side of opinion, but I’ll do my damnedest to support my side of an argument.

But for many people, like The Lead Paint Eater from last night, they seem to believe that the Sagan Standard doesn’t apply to them, that they are able to voice the most extraordinary claims without having a shred of evidence to back them up.  To paraphrase Harlan Ellison, this is the Clarion Cry of the Yahoo, the person who doesn’t care if you don’t like what they have to say, they going to damn well say it, because it’s what they believe to be the truth–and if you try to bring facts to the discussion, they’ll cry foul and accuse you of everything from genocide to forced sex with their goldfish.

Really, the train wreck aspects of watching an ass like this crash and burn in spectacular fashion is far outweighed by their ignorant, petulant, and at times borderline-racist screaming on any shiny thing that happens to catch their attention for the moment.  It’s not worth the hassle; it’s not worth allowing one’s brain cells to witness such a calamity, and to anguish over whether the choices available are fight, flight, or shotgunning Drano in order to end this exposure to terminal stupidity and bring about the peace of sweet, sweet death.

One should learn from their mistakes.  I have from mine.

At least until next time.

Damn.  I should stick to writing novels, you know?