Author Archives: Blaze

The Hero’s Journey VERSUS Seven Point Plot Structure

Leave a reply

So I never intended to be a writer, in the way of many of the folks I know. They were all in on English, literature, creative writing, etc. I actually wanted to take a speech class for my last semester in High School, but the lovely bitch assistant principle explained that if I wanted her signature on things, I would take a creative writing class instead.

[Archaeological background: I started college when I was sixteen, so getting official signatures for approvals on variances in education factored heavily into a lot of my life until much later. To this day, I can’t be sure that “adults in the other room” didn’t have a conversation when I wasn’t around, intended to push me into the field of art. It failed. My undergraduate majors were Political Science and Philosophy, with a Minor in Geography (which was a nice way of saying I have a map fetish).

In college, I took one creative writing class that was so wonderful I stopped writing entirely for several years afterwards. (Vicious woman who hated all men. I had been warned that I could not get an A from her going in. I was very obviously her favorite student, and got a B+ from her, while almost every female in class got an A. Interesting, huh? But it reinforced that I could write poetry and needed to skip all that other shit and get an education so I could have a financially-rewarding career.]

All the above is to say that I had a weird relationship with the English language as a kid. Never learned a lot of the rote tools they taught, because of reasons. I learned more about the technical structure English by studying Spanish, German, and Latin than I did from any of my English teachers along the way. But that’s a story for another day.

Recently, I went deep into that thing called the Hero’s Journey, looking at it from the standpoint of several different folks, all of whom had officially-recognized opinions. I’m familiar with the pattern, but at the same time I was reading up on that topic, I came across a news article with much wailing and gnashing of teeth about how Tolkien and Lewis had once set up a program at Oxford specifically to teach people how to write fantasy as we have come to understand it in genre literature (Epic or one of the sword and sorcery variants here). The program apparently ran from 1931-70, but the folks it had trained were now all retiring and the writer was furious that so much would be lost. So I dug in to what he was demanding we teach.

Tolkien taught something like the classical Hero’s Journey (more later) but shaped everything around an extremely narrow range in time and place, as a sort of 12th Century, Anglo/French world upon which everything was built. If you read his stuff or any of the innumerable folks slavishly mimicking him, they ALL BLEED TOGETHER.

That’s fine if you’re into that exact story, but I find that it you have read one, you have read almost all of them. The only thing that changes are the names of the characters and the kingdoms. It’s almost like Romance in that way, where things are on rails. Hard rails you can never deviate from.

So back to Hero’s Journey. There are a long set of steps that must be followed, in order to tell this story. Lovely. Good. In science fiction, we call most of that stuff setting.

However, the thing that jumped out at me was the critical importance of how the character must be shown in their native environment, being utterly mundane before something terrible happens that causes them to leave home forever for some grand adventure.

In deft hands, it can be done masterfully, but most of the folks I have ever encountered in the field of epic/sword fantasy are probably hacks. You end up with several chapters of the characters mostly standing around and doing nothing, so you can show just how terribly unremarkable their lives are. I grow bored, because nothing is happening. ONLY MUCH LATER does a plot actually happen. Theoretically.

After digesting that maybe this was the reason I had such problems with fantasy, I went and looked at my various bookshelves.

People who knew me in the wayback can tell you that I used to have a lot of books. As in, 30+ bankers boxes, just of books. Most of those paperback. After Donna died, I flipped my life and decided that I needed to pare things down. Ballpark, I got rid of about 3,000 books over the next 7 years, before I moved out to the farm. Every month, 10% more stuff had to leave the house than came in. Half-Priced Books, Goodwill, and the dump. Every month.

So I went looking through the 300 or so books I still have left. More than half are reference/research. Non-fiction. Of those that remain, less than a dozen are fantasy. Donaldson’s Mordant’s Need. Russell’s Initiate Brother. Both duologies.

I do have the complete Eternal Champion by Moorcock, because I got those in fancy hardbacks with jackets in the early 90s when they came out. A little David Drake, but I’m not generally a fan of his fantasy stuff so I got rid of the Isles hardcovers.

No fantasy. That surprised the hell out of me.

Conversation with Fabulous Publisher Babe™ brought all together. In the act of spending those chapters at the front being unremarkable, you lose me. Bore me.

Once she showed me the Lester Dent Seven Point Plot Structure (see my Business For Breakfast book on the topic), I just immediately gravitated in that direction. That was early and I never looked back.

Character, in a Setting, with a Problem. That’s the first five hundred words of your story, by the way, short or epic novel series. And in those first five hundred you should have only a sentence of problem, but that can be enough foreshadowing. (Pulse Pounders tend to start with a bang and a problem, and all of chapter one is a high octane race until you slow down a little later.)

Luke Skywalker is the hero of Star Wars and the two sequels. (R2D2 is the protagonist, by the way.) When we first meet him, George Lucas SPECIFICALLY made him a whiny punk, to show how later he grows up and becomes a hero. Go back and listen to his first line of dialog, and note the delivery. Now compare that to him tossing aside his light saber aside and mocking Palpitine at the end of Jedi.

How do you handle your mundane opening? How much time do you spend wallowing in nothingness before an actual story comes along?

One thing that writers often do until they learn better is to “slow walk to the story.” That’s where the editor looks at your manuscript and says, “Okay, and on page five we finally got to the plot.” Back in the Anthology Workshop days, that was a frequent refrain, but it taught people to hit their openings. When I took the Strengths Workshop, that was Dean’s advice. The practice was to start a story and stop writing at exactly five hundred words. Nothing more.

You had to have your character, your setting, and your problem there.

The way Dean teaches it, you have to grab hold of your reader by the throat on page one, and drag her to the bottom of the lake, never giving her any opportunity to escape you and surface, because if she gets away, she might not come back. Every break gives them a chance. Any time you “kick someone out of the story” by getting something wrong or telling things out of order, they might escape and not finish your story.

In the case of that long, detailed, mundanity of an opening, I might not ever make it deep enough into your story to actually discover that you had a plot. Like Dean, I’m always looking for a reason not to finish a story, unless it hooks me. I have better things to do with my time that settle for pedestrian fiction.

Lucas had you in Star Wars, even with Luke being a mopey teen, because he hooked you on page one with one of the greatest openings of all time. Tell me you didn’t shiver with excitement as the camera pans down into the middle of a space battle coming right past you at point blank range, followed by the battle in the corridors, followed by bad ass in black armor with a light saber in his hands walking through the smoke.

I rarely ever follow the classically-delineated Hero’s Journey opening because I start the story at the moment when something interesting is about to happen. I have four hundred of those first five hundred words to show the character and the setting being as normal as its going to get before all hell breaks loose. After that, you might slip away.

The same goes at the end, when people seem to want to have a dozen epilogues showing how everything returned to normal and lived happily ever after. I only ever use an afterthought like that to advance the story past the “ending” of the thing. Jessica Keller ended <<<SPOILER ALERT>>>with her decision to negotiate instead of burning the whole galaxy down.<<<SPOILER ALERT>>>

From there, I resolved the stories of many of the interesting characters, so that you got their happy-for-now moment, but also setting things up for other things to occur And each of those did not show a return to normalcy. They gave you some important bit of information about “how” things were resolving. (Hint: it never returns to normal.)

So when you look at your intended story, how much time have you spent noodling around and not actually telling me anything useful at the opening? How long does it take for the adventure to begin? How many dwarf Bollywood numbers are necessary BEFORE the plot occurs?

And how much more interesting would your story be if things happened on page one?

I Can Never Fail

Leave a reply

So Fabulous Publisher Babe™ and I have the Anti-Stodgy Campaign, where each month we consciously try to do something new. Something fresh. Something we’ve never done before.

I will be the first to admit that it doesn’t always work out, but the whole point is the newness, not the potential improvements to efficiency. She and I got to talking the other day and I made the comment that “I can never fail.”

I need to break that down for the folks playing along at home. I can fail, but it doesn’t matter. Just this afternoon I poured a half-gallon of hooch down the drain because it just didn’t work out. Coffee intended for turning into wine, but it really just ended up being all the bitterness of coffee with the astringency of alcohol. Nothing worth pursuing, because we drink for the taste and wouldn’t go after that taste.

But the rum worked out and I’ll make it again. The coffee mead is still brewing, and hopefully that works. Again, not worried.

I cannot fail because I am not trying to succeed. Or rather, I measure success in the “trying something new” not in the outcome.

Recently, I got contacted by a musician who picked up on my usual comment that I wanted to be Bernie Taupin. He needed a lyricist and asked if I was interested in becoming his Bernie.

Well, hell, that sounds like fun. Never written lyrics, but I have written a lot of poetry in my time, so I’m used to breathing the words and finding the rhythm of the thing. So we met for coffee and hit it off. He’s a fun guy.

I went home and finished one of my instant expert research books on the shelf, related to writing musical lyrics. (I have a weird library these days.) I read the lyrics section and skipped the composition part because I cannot write music. And skipped the business part because the book is twenty years old, and so everything is likely badly out of date. But writing lyrics and score does not change, except to get easier as the tools evolve.

I wanted to experiment with lyrics. So I did.

In the last week, I’ve written lyrics to three songs. I have no idea if they are any good. I’ll let Elton take a look in a few days and pronounce his opinion. I trust that he’ll have useful opinions that I can turn around and use to make my writing better, because he’s been doing this for decades.

The best job review I ever got was broken down into “Do more of this. Keep doing this. Do less of this.” It was fantastic because I could work with that. (When I started dating again, his sage advice was “Be less you.” and I understood that. Didn’t need it in the end, because I found a woman who was enough of herself to handle me, but that also worked. Haven’t worked for him in 14 years and we still talk occasionally.)

So my approach to writing lyrics is that I cannot fail. I mean, hell, what’s the worst thing that could happen? Someone likes them enough to record the song and I hear it on the radio? Gosh.

I cannot fail, because I tried something new. Anything new. That was the success.

You can’t fail, if you intend to do new things and become a newer/better you. So go out and try some new hobby.

Personally, I try to keep a list of twelve things that I want to pursue at any given time. Then, on a regular basis (frequently June 1 and Dec 1), I chuck one or two out so I can try new things. Lyric writing replaced something else. Okay. If it works out, we’ve do more. If not, I’ll mark it down as a REALLY useful learning experience and move on.

I tried something new. I succeeded. When you try something new, you succeed.

In fact, for me, the only way to fail would be to just keep doing the same thing for the rest of my life. Eat the same food. Listen to the same five albums. Wear the same clothes.

Yuck.

Stodgy. Don’t do that.

Try.

That is the single most important lesson anyone ever taught me.

Strive.

What new thing have you done lately?

Season Two: A Sneak Peek

Leave a reply

So the first eight Science Officer books cover one complete arc of long story story, broken into a number of pieces. When I was done with Hammerfield, I needed a break, because I had told Javier’s story the way I wanted, but always knew that there was more out there. (I have extensive notes on more, so never fear.)

After 8, Javier’s world had changed some, as all of you are by now aware, so I needed to take a different look at things before starting what I called “Season Two.” The result was Book 9 (The Bryce Connection), which is a collection of four short stories introducing new characters, as well as letting some of the others get more screen time and development.

Then I wrote the first of Season Two: The Alien Suns. That is Book 10 (Alien Seas) and is the first novel in the series. From here, I plan on them all being novels. Self-contained so you don’t have to worry about cliff hangars, unless I split 16 & 17 when I get there, like I did 7 & 8.

So far, so good. Even threw in the first ‘Mina Teague novella, and everything is coming out on December 10.

However, I got contacted by Planet Bob, asking if I had any novels that could go into a Space Opera storybundle and offered him Alien Seas as an exclusive, several weeks before anyone could get it anywhere else. (In fact, the pre-order period ends on the same day as the bundle does, so everyone else will be able to read it by then.)

This is your chance to read Alien Seas before anyone else. It helps if you’ve read the first eight, but I think you’d be able to have fun with the story directly without. You’d just be missing a whole raft of inside jokes that will make old time fans giggle when they encounter them. And 9 sets things up by providing backstories for the new characters you’ll meet, but they are all there on the page.

And, because this is a Storybundle, you can get a whole bunch of other novels for one cheap price. Pay what you want for the first four novels, but if you put in at least $15 US, you’ll get all ten, including five exclusives, meaning not available anywhere else.

That’s me, Leah R Cutter, Dean Wesley Smith, Ron Collins, and Planet Bob himself. Nowhere else.

Treat yourself to an early turkey day treat, or maybe get them now and then save them for Xmas day. Or not. Normally, it’s worth holding off, but this is 2020, and you deserve something special that puts a smile on your face. God knows we all do.

So go look at this fantastic Space Opera storybundle and plunk down your money. You will be excited, entertained, and everything else that comes with really good science fiction space opera.

And hurry, because as always, this is a limited time offer.

OryCon 2020

Leave a reply

I did a Con

OryCon has always been one of my favorites. For the last several years I have even been lucky enough to be on panels, talking about what it means to be a writer in the modern age.

OryCon is even moving into the present, however slowly and painfully. For the longest time, all of their writing track panels were aimed at how to get an agent and a book deal, in spite of the number of us making a living Indie. (Hell, the most recent rumblings from Industry Insiders suggest that traditional publishing, as it has been known, does not survive the pandemic, and that all the big houses will shake out and largely collapse into places where only the biggest names get book deals, but many of us are not surprised. Reach out direct if you have questions.)

This year, the con had to be online and way cut down. Instead of the old days where there was a filk room, a crafting room, a kids track, and maybe thirty rooms with panels going on at any given moment, that was reduced in the end to three channels. And all online.

So Friday, Fabulous Publisher Babe™ had her first panel at 1pm. It went well. She and I were on a second panel together at 2pm, with the ever-wonderful Josh Vogt, discussing “Creating Your Own Anthologies, Bundles, and Magazines.” It was the usual talk about vellum, BookBrush.com, and BundleRabbit, and how those allow the Babe and I to put out twelve anthologies a year (although we’re cutting that down some in 2022, depending on how things go). The world has changed, and you really can do it these days, and on the relatively cheap, as well.

After that, she was done until Sunday, but I had two more.

I went straight into “Can You Really Carry That?” with Guest of Honor A. Lee Martinez and podcaster Remy Lerner. That was a hoot, talking about armor in fantasy versus literature and role-playing games. How much is too much for encumbrance, and how the hell do you really loot that many gold coins from a dead dragon?

Finally (and we’re talking three hours in a row here) “Do I Really Need an Editor?” with EM Prazeman and Joyce Reynolds-Ward. I’ve known both ladies for many years, so we had a fun, wide-ranging talk about all aspects of the things that happen AFTER you have finished your manuscript. Why you should learn to write clean first drafts. What are the various kinds of editor you might hire. Why the editor you get recommended might not work out, which turned into a discussion of Voice, both the character and the writer.

I’m sorry that I didn’t get to do “Military Rank Structures and their Functionality” because I would have taken that shit entirely sideways. Anyone who has read my science fiction understands that I put a lot of time and research into military ranks, trying to make them completely original and more than just the exact same thing everyone else does based on how the US Army worked from 1990-2005.

At that, I had been “On” for three hours, sitting in Vintage Coffee in Maple Valley, WA. That’s the closest non-corporate spot, and I needed to use somebody else’s wifi for that many hours of heavy lifting. Even wore my mask for the first two, but after that the place emptied out and I was a little more confident without my mask on. Not entirely, because Washington State goes into mandatory lockdown tomorrow, but the numbers in my immediate zip codes haven’t been too bad. (I expect that to change.)

I went home and crashed: emotionally, mentally, physically. This introvert had had enough.

But for the whole Con being online, it went well. Each panel had a monitor who’s job was to kick out jackasses who couldn’t behave, and I only had one of those. Mar got rid of her quickly and the rest of the day went well.

The think I did miss was being able to just hang out with folks I only see as con buddies. At least these days I have social media, so I can stay in touch, but not everyone does that, so there are folks I only see at OryCon. Those are the ones I look forward to seeing. We used to do a massive group breakfast, in the old days, when we could reserve a table for a dozen folks, and then get twenty as people came and went over the course of a morning.

That’s how you build good friendships, sitting around and arguing politics and nerdiness with people you like and respect. Didn’t get that this year. Hoping that by this time next year, COVID has turned into a seasonal flu kind of thing, with a vaccine you can get that works and keeps most people from catching it.

The problem has always been that a spike fills the ICU beds at the hospital, and then anyone who comes along with ANYTHING is out of luck. So being at home and zooming in from a coffee shop is a price I find worth paying.

Hopefully the folks who attended the con had fun. I’ve already gotten a new Patreon patron from it, so that was wonderful.

With any luck, the world is coming back to something like normal, but that won’t be until February, based on the math of the current pandemic, so everyone be careful out there, because I need you supporting my lifestyle.

NaNoWriMo Check-in

Leave a reply

I don’t do NaNo, which is the National Novel Writing Month. Everyone participating is aiming for a goal of writing a 50,000 word novel in November, which is a fantastic goal for most writers. In the old days, Traditional Publishing (aka New York City) only let you publish one novel per year. I know a number of folks from that world who have multiple pennames as a result. One for fantasy. One for science fiction. One for mystery. Etc. They wrote fast then, but the system wasn’t prepared to handle it.

But pulp writing goes back, obviously, to the pulp era. There used to be hundreds of different magazines, in every conceivable genre, needing new material every month. Writers working those periodicals would work all day, frequently finishing a story at 4:30pm and putting a new piece of paper into the typewriter and starting the next story.

In those days, you could make a living selling short fiction at a penny a word if you were lucky. These days, you’d need to put 4-6 short stories into print every month in order to maintain any sort of income, and there are far fewer professionally-paying markets these days to support you.

But you can write and publish Indie. Create your own company. Do your own covers and marketing copy. Publish your stories.

You are responsible for your own career. People I respect remind me of that on a regular basis.

For me, that means I can write fast, publish regularly, and make a pretty decent living. Without ever having to put on pants if I don’t want to.

A friend was teasing me the other day that I was spending too much time on social media because I was sharing some silly things designed to make people laugh. I had to remind him that I had finished October having written just over 1.2 million words for the year, which included eleven novels and forty-four stories of less-than-novel-length. (Anything under 40k, as it were.)

In those old days, you had strict rules you lived by if you wanted a tradpub career. Those days are gone.

In October, I finished the month with 125,610 words written. I plan on replicating that in November and December, because I’m not traveling anywhere for the holidays this year. (Obviously, right?) Instead of NaNoWriMo, I might write two shorter novels in November. Maybe 45k each. And some other things. Who knows.

I woke up this morning and started a novel, but only because I had finished two more Gunderson SF Crime stories in the last few days and my original goal had been fourteen novels this year and forty shorts. The weirdest part was that writer-brain wasn’t sure what we were writing.

It happens. Not writer-block but story-block. Usually I shift around until I find the thing that makes writer-brain happy and run with it. This morning, I walked slowly through the list of open series I had out there, but none of them were happy-making.

Finally, the answer was “tired of science fiction.” Weird, but okay, I can deal with that. Have some sword and sorcery fantasy. Have some urban fantasy. Have some other things. Stepped through those and writer-brain lit on the next Shrike The Orque novel. (No, I got no clue.)

Blueberry is a short chopped out of the novella Rebels. Wrote both in about 2014, give or take. When I switched to primarily writing SF, all that kind of went fallow. However, I did write a follow-on novel to Rebels in 2018. It cliff-hangared hard at the end, so I couldn’t just publish it without writing the rest of the story arc. Apparently, I have started today.

Barely remember how it ended, so I pulled up the doc and read the last four chapters this morning, just to remember where the hell I was. (That was 35 novels ago, give or take.) Then I picked up the thread and started moving forward. I remember the wider arc I was planning, and have noted, but those notes were maybe ten lines to span two full novels of stuff, most of which was book four and how the final quest ended.

So, technically, I started a novel this morning along with everyone else doing NaNo, however weird that is. Mostly timing, because once I hit pace I will finish this novel in about 12 days, with other things thrown in on the side for reasons. Not sure if I will just write both of them back to back, or insert something between, but apparently I am writing sword and sorcery fantasy right now to round out the year.

Weirder things have happened, ya know.

What are you folks working on for NaNo?

Something Sort Of Like Normal

Leave a reply

I work from home. Have since March 2018. For me, the sudden “work from home” that everyone else fell into earlier this year wasn’t much of a hiccup. Instead, book sales tended to sag (if you weren’t in one of the subscription services, which saw a boost when people were suddenly worried about expenses). Hoping they will recover in Dec.

But for the last six months or so I have been navigating a new world where we weren’t ever going out to dinner, weren’t doing much shopping, and generally staying away from everyone. Didn’t help when Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) got what we think was a mild case that knocked her down for a few days in April and gave her about a month of brain fog. Hard isolation at that point, but I never developed symptoms.

So what was the summer like? My favorite restaurant–Krain Cafe just north of Enumclaw, WA– went for a while to take-out only, so I would go down on Friday afternoon and get a pair of breakfasts I could heat up, partly to support them and partly to get me out. My regular D&D gaming went away, but I found a different online/zoom group to play with, remote only for a while, although we have met in person a few times.

Mostly, for me, it was never going into town. I have the farm based on studies I did in the late 80s and early 90s talking about the possible fall of the american republic in 2020. (Yes, that long ago the trend lines of what was possibly coming were apparent, if you studied certain things.) I am away from everyone, remote, and generally quiet. 6+ acres, more than half trees and ponds. Fruit to harvest in the summer/fall. Herbs for the garden to cook with. Not survivalist mode, but we went into 2020 prepared for storms that would knock out power and trap us for a week at a time. Coffin freezer with half a pig and other things frozen. Etc. (Seattle, by the way, might have made the news this summer. She would have been able to smell the tear gas clouds from her old house up on Capital Hill downtown. Possibly breathe them.)

But I used to write all morning and then head into town in the early afternoon to run errands. That went away.

Today, I actually got another little bit of normalcy back. Had to run down to drop off ballots at the drop box. (Not trusting the Postal Service as long as those jackasses run it, regardless of what the rank and file can do to mitigate stupidity.) Went by and dropped off recycling as well. (I burn anything paper, compost anything organic, recycle anything we can, and end up going to the dump about every 4-6 weeks for four cans of trash.)

Decided to hit the pawn shop at the east end of Enumclaw while I was down there. They bought out a couple of video stores at some point, and have something like two shipping containers of dvds and blueray to get rid of. Most of it is weird schlock, as one might expect, but I keep a spreadsheet of my video library and a short list of things I’m looking for to fill in gaps. Like having the Fraser Mummy movies 2 & 3 but not 1. Found that today. Got a couple of other oddities, like a double feature of 2001 and Clockwork Orange. Haven’t seen the former in ages and not sure I’ve ever seen the latter, although I have read the English edition (with the extra chapter the American version chopped off the end.)

I have a Synology NAS on an airgapped local network. 4@6Tb drives in a RAID 5, or a metric shit-ton of space, so I have ripped every dvd I still own (after a massive purge I occasionally regret) and then go back to fill it in and buy/rip new disks. We don’t have cable. I hardly ever watch entertainment on the screen (tv shows, sports, etc.). But I do watch movies occasionally, and I have a low trust of the big streaming services. The things you want to watch will vanish one day, because there will peak out at around 20 such services, and everyone will hoard their IP rather than making it generally available.

I can watch whatever I find and own. Better this way. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) isn’t sure what caper she’s going to write one of these days, but her writer-brain has her rewatching all of Leverage, since it is now ripped and she can just pull a few episodes at a time to watch while doing other things. I need to get back into the habit, but there are few tv shows I want to watch. Might buy all of Star Trek TOS and TAS just so I can rip those and work back through them, but that might take me years.

I don’t binge, because in the summer my afternoons are working on the farm. Winter I’m a little more stuck inside, especially this coming one where I expect infection spikes because every time I go out I see idiots who don’t cover their nose. Sometimes, they don’t even mask, but a lot of places have gotten stricter now that the state has started cracking down and issuing fines to businesses.

But, you know, idiots.

So old stuff, mostly to put information in the backbrain. I wrote a book one in a new epic space opera series where the bridge of the massive starship is absolutely taken from the floor plans to Space: 1999, because it was completely different from any other SF I can remember, where they are always either WW2 submarines or TOS/TNG for design. Both work, but that means everyone else looks alike. Sounds alike. Is alike.

Yuck.

So today I got to have an almost normal afternoon. Shopped with my drapery mask on (that’s what the cloth was from in my pile when I needed to sew something that fit me comfortably). Squirted the hand sanitizer as I paid. Brought home three new cases with all manner of weird.

Getting into a new normal, if the old one is forever gone.

What are you doing to build a future instead of lamenting a past?

Blaze Ward Presents

Leave a reply

Seriously. Or rather, not so serious, as it were. When you open an anthology call with a one sentence theme, and challenge people to out-weird each other, the results can be strange. And a lot of fun.

As of October 1, I have put out the open call for Issue #4: “Cloak and Dagger”

However you choose to interpret that, mind you. An Interpretation of Moles should have cured you of expecting stories on rails. We don’t do that here.

  1. An Interpretation of Moles
  2. I Like My Science…MAD
  3. Nuns With Guns

Stories are due in my hands by the end of October 31. We’ll publish it on Dec 1, if all goes well, so there is no slack in the schedule. I expect professional to participate, and I judge professionalism entirely on the ability to respond to email promptly and with the information I need or questions.

I get tired of the [Level Monster Issue]

That’s where someone gets an email needing information, or a response, but cannot bring themselves to push the button and say something. Seriously, there are not many things in this world that I find more annoying than that. When it comes time to publish, everyone had to hit deadlines less than a week apart. I can’t hold an anthology like this. (I can, but choose not to, because either you are a pro, or you are junior varsity. I know some big name authors who let act like pissy dilettantes on deadlines. I won’t work with again.)

Since I announce the BWP Anthologies generally on Facebook for now, I figured I might let people know about it here, in the wider arc of my voice. Or a different audience. Whatever.

If you have questions about submitting, ping me. As with the previous ones, we’re going to have fun. No reason you shouldn’t join us.

🙂

Fire, Chaos, and Rebirth

Leave a reply

On top of everything else in 2020, I had to rebuild the barn roof. Took the opportunity to clean out the middle bay of the barn itself. That’s the one with a lot of personal stuff, but some things have gone a little wrong.

My Mom lived with me for a few years, back when I was still in Renton and in the process of building out on the farm. When she moved back to St. Louis, she took what she could fit in her car and left me with the rest. It went into the barn until I had the spoons to deal with it.

Moving out here after Donna died meant dealing with a lot of personal stuff. More spoons. She was an artist, so I have some of her drawings, but have been slowly cycling most of them off to the step-daughters to handle for the various grands and eventual great-grands.

This was also the summer we had the wood house restained, inside and out, so I had to take everything down and move it out. Then I got to put it back, but Fabulous Publisher Babe™ and I decided that it didn’t have to go “right back” to what it had been. So we kinda moved into the house again, almost from scratch. Changed things around.

New art on the walls, with a bunch of old art that either went to the daughters (if Donna’s) or hauled off to Value Village to recycle. Books gone away as we moved shelves around.

Then I had to go through the barn stuff, all of which had been there at least six years. My Mother did not pack her boxes particularly well, so they got damp, which meant mildew. It also meant mice climbing in and chewing things. Old books of no particular value, and yucky, so I burned them. Salvaged what I could, but not everything could be saved. Nature of the beast.

Fire is the best way to cleanse some of those things.

As I opened old boxes, I also found a few containing stuff I had either forgotten about, or had been looking for and unable to find because they were back and underneath.

I used to be a prolific letter writer. Found letters from friends dating back to the early and mid 80s. Some of those people I haven’t seen in 30-35 years. Maybe “never heard from them again” after I went off to LA for grad school and didn’t take hardly any connections with me.

You could to that in those days. Just move and eventually the address forwarding expired, so letters were returned undeliverable. Phone numbers used to be geographical, so you had to get a new one when you moved and maybe it was unlisted.

Who knows who might have tried to reach me after 1990 and failed? Other letters from folks I did talk to in the 90s, when I was in California, or later when I left and went back to Kansas, before ending up in Seattle in 1997.

But I had saved a lot of correspondence from old girlfriends. None of it less than 25 years old. Most of them I couldn’t locate today if my life depended on it. There are a number of “And I never saw her again after 1997” in my past.

Those went into the fire.

I don’t have children of my own. I inherited grown step-daughters who are five months to five years younger than me, but they have lives and I’m only kind of tangential to them. They are at least all still friends, twelve years after their mother died. I count that as a win.

So I burned things.

It it liberating, putting things to the torch. All that stuff holds you down, a feather at a time. You don’t appreciate how much it weighs until one day you cast it into the purifying fires and call it done.

“Hey, whatever happened to him?” questions can go unanswered, because only a few strangers from that distant past know how to find me today. And we’re all probably better off not knowing, because then you lose the mystique.

Fire is an agency of chaos, reducing the order of words on paper to flames. That which was because unknown, lost forever. It does not bring me guilt, because I made peace with myself a long time ago, and all I can do for some people is silently apologize and not bother them.

I eventually chose to be happy, but those old letters shined a light on the guy I was 25 or 35 years ago.

But they are not who I am, nor who I choose to be.

They are merely images on a wall.

Pictures of who I used to be.

Faces.

Gentrification and boba

3 Replies

I live in a highly redneck section of King County, Washington. Most people think of this as the Left Coast and Starbucks sipping hippies (not entirely untrue) but if you go by zipcodes, I’m pretty sure this area went red by a significant margin in 2016. I knew that when I bought the property to move out here from where I used to be in the white, middle-class, red districts of Fairwood (a neighborhood of Renton, WA) in 2010.

Part of my reasoning then (and going back as far as 1988 if you want) was that 2020 was going to be a terrible inflection point in US history, for reasons I have discussed in other places and won’t rehash here. Didn’t want to be in “The City” when what I saw coming caught fire.

I got lucky and found this particular property in 2010. The previous owner had died at the end of 2006, and his various kids had been trying to sell it, but there were “issues.” It had even gone so far as serious negotiations from another person, but he got chased off by the neighbors, in a polite way. Another Microsoft millionaire type, set to move out here and “change everything.”

The land is 6.5 acres, at the end of a cul-de-sac. I have a neighbor, E, above me, who originally bought most of his section of land in 1963 and then sold it off in chunks over the decades, especially when she and her husband divorced and he left. I remember E explaining to me one day, early on, that one of these days the Feds would be coming for her and it would be Ruby Ridge all over again. The others in the conversation just nodded and agreed, so you have a pretty good idea who my neighbors on three sides are.

Fourth side are 60s hippies that mostly grew old but are still a little weird. I got lucky when I was getting serious about buying by randomly starting at the Hippie household to meet the prospective neighbors. R & C told me about the guy just south of me who scares everyone, and what to say to him.

Mind you, when I got to the top of his driveway, he was already standing in his front door, pot belly all shirtless and deployed, and I’m assuming a shotgun out of sight. He’s like that.

“You G?” I yell from my truck.

“Who wants to know?” he yells back.

“R & C told me I should come up here and say hello,” I answer. “Looking to buy M’s old place.”

M had put down a foundation and covered it, planning to put a modular home on it back in 1991. But then he found out that the school board would charge him a building levy for that, and he threw a screaming, hissing fit (as I got the story 20 years later). Ended up living for the next 16 years out of a 26’ gooseneck horse trailer, with a 55 gallon drum set in the ground for a septic tank. Really serious, gold-fringe-on-the-flag sort of fellow, if you get my drift.

There are a lot of those folks around here. But you know what I’ve seen in the last ten years?

Gentrification. The Safeway in Maple Valley (town wjhen I go west) started carrying exotic cheeses. When they built a Fred Meyers (kind of like a SuperWalmart with regular stuff AND groceries) it had a huge cheese booth. Wrapped on three sides of about ten feet each, displaying maybe a hundred weird cheeses. That’s my barometer of hipster around here, as you can tell.

Then two plots right around there got developed and a bunch of McMansions got built in the stretch 2010-2016. More recently, a couple of new apartment developments have gone in.

The world in town is changing. I’m still out in the weird, red zones, past a wilderness that can’t be developed because Kent, WA and Seattle, WA bought both sides of the road for several miles and fenced them in. I’m in a pocket that is still trapped in the 1950s in many ways.

But the gentrification progresses.

With the pandemic, nobody can really go out to eat. For a long stretch, all the restaurants were take out only. And we did, supporting our favorites. More recently, they can open, but at half capacity. Enumclaw, WA, the city I usually go to, closed off several side streets and put up pavilion tents and rented tables and chairs, turning those streets into sidewalk cafe seating so that the restaurants on Cole and other streets could serve the same number of folks as before. Hopefully, they’ll live. Some good ones I enjoy.

But it has been ‘food trucks’ that was not on my pandemic bingo card. Usually, they do the fair circuit in the summer, but all those are shut down, so neighborhoods have organized to have trucks rotate through. (I have found some fun new eats that way, and we’ve kept them in business.)

So this last week, Ravensdale, WA had their usual Wednesday Truck event. New burger truck I haven’t had before (pretty good, too). But next to them was a truck doing bubble teas, smoothies, and other exotic drinks.

Exotic to the locals, that is. Normal international fare when my wife lived on Capital Hill in downtown Seattle and we could walk all sorts of places.

I got boba with my burger. Brown sugar, milk, ice, boba. Stir. A hint bland, but that was because they didn’t have any good fruit syrups to add.

But this is gold-fringe, You-Can’t-Make-Me-Wear-A-Mask, crazy hard right wing country. And the bubble tea truck did pretty good business. Not as good as good, old-fashioned American Cheese burgers, even with that weird Waygu meat. But there was a bubble tea truck penetrating the consciousness of this zip code.

Makes me all warm and fuzzy to think about, because it means that the folks moving out here are not white, blue-collar, right-wing voters. The city might develop services. Places. Things.

Enumclaw has a downtown. That’s why I go there. Maple Valley is closer, but it is Generica Suburbia on the highway, and not really a place. Some good restaurants. The library. A trail that has been converted from an old railroad bed.

Nothing like a downtown where you could walk around on a Sunday afternoon. Strip malls and fast food make up most of the city. I dream of that changing, as well, but I’m not holding my breath. Maybe another decade.

But this week I had a moment of hope, in a year of suck. Boba, from a food truck, in Ravensdale, Washington.

Will wonders never cease?

Hard Reset

Leave a reply

August has kind of sucked. Not terrible, but just a drag on all aspects. First we got the house restained inside and out at the end of July, which was lovely, but required me to tear the house apart so the guy could get to all the walls and ceiling. Still not back to normal. Not sure when I will be.

He finished up on a Tuesday having spent most of a week. That Wednesday I started tearing part of the roof off the barn to replace where it had rotted. Hotter than usual, so we worked first thing in the morning until it got hot. Got some writing done in the afternoon/evening, but I was usually just exhausted so I maybe would get a thousand words or so. Took Saturday and Sunday off, but those were both just recovery days because I had no spoons left, after tearing out the old deck, replacing several ribs and the full run of horizontals, and then re-decking.

Monday/Tuesday were spent reshingling the new roof, with Tuesday being the first rain in a month while we’re on the roof working. Wednesday was a recovery day. Thursday we drove to Portland from Seattle and helped my cousin move stuff out of the new house and into a storage unit, after she had messed up her back. We drove back Thursday after a late lunch. Friday and Saturday I was social.

This last Sunday I had a pajamas day. Those are the days I don’t put on anything except my pjs and don’t leave the house. Managed 7500 words to finish off a novel. That was good. Had some bad things happen in the afternoon, and I just kind of all just boiled over.

Monday, I got up intent on writing a new short story in one of my existing universes, and needed to edit the previous story in it. Got the editing done and had no words. None. Not even a glimmer.

Took the rest of the day sideways. Went for a long drive with the music up and the phone set to airplane mode so nobody would text me and use up my last spoon or get on my last nerve.

Did work out an entire new universe I want to write in and planned some stories. The next three issues of Boundary Shock Quarterly that I’m working into (14-16) were Space Marines, Cargo Wars, and Wandering Monsters. Writer brain looked at those and framed a setting, an arc, and I came up with a character to put into all of them sequentially. (Later, it laid out for me a multi-novel space marine arc to write. Go me?)

Tuesday I actually wrote. 4000 words for the first time in more than two weeks. Today (Wednesday) I wrote 5000 to finish that story off. Tomorrow, I plan to start the next one. Friday I am social again, so might not get many words done in the morning and will circle back in the afternoon. Same with Sunday.

For a guy that thrives on averaging 4000 words per day over incredibly long stretches, I am more than 13,000 words off my accustomed pace. Until this today, I wasn’t sure I would hit my usual 100,000 words for the month. Just above 90k right now, after generating 16,500 just since Sunday morning.

Last year, I had a stretch about the same time, but for different reasons. This year I am just emotionally exhausted, and that’s taken a physical toll. Some of you have seen my other blog posts to see how far out of true I’ve gotten. Hip and lower back are hurting today. Again, physical response to emotional.

I can say definitively that I have made changes. Will continue to make them. Have cauterized a number of people out of my existence this summer who were too negative or offensive. Done dealing with that. And those people. Forever.

Have had too many drama queens who thought that I gave a shit because I hadn’t just jumped in with both feet to just destroy them. Have come close with a few of them, just because I’d be doing the world a favor to shatter a couple of those people into jagged, little bits of pain that I didn’t have to ever deal with again.

Might, yet. Folks have forgotten to be nice to one another, and I’m largely tired of their drama. The difference in 2020 is that I’ll just write you off and never talk to you again.

Keep that in mind when you are an asshole to people who didn’t deserve it. Like me.

Oh, and keep that shit away from me because I won’t lose any sleep if I destroy your entire psyche, one of these days. Doing the universe a favor.