Category Archives: Personal

A Day Off

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I had not brain today. (Warning, still slightly loopy, upon review.)

Fixed dinner last night and managed to poison myself. I have always had a mild allergic reaction to onions, as far back as I can remember. Used to be I thought it was just a bad reaction, but I really am allergic. Just not all that bad.

More recently (maybe 10 years ago), I developed a severe allergic reaction to mushrooms. Hives and itching, though, instead of Anaphylaxis. I can treat it with a lot of Benadryl, both taken as a pill and then a spray on all the parts breaking out.

Not sure exactly what the allergy is, but anytime I have had cross-contamination with mushrooms it happens. Got it last night.

BAD.

Had to dose myself into senescence bad.

Like most (committed) writers, I have a pretty solid daily routine that helps me maximize my words. I say committed because I know a few dilettantes who claim to be writers but never seem to. At the other end, I know a few moms with young kids, and they write when they can, even to the point of locking themselves in the bathroom for five minutes or getting some time when the kids are down for a nap.

Neither of those groups has a time blocked out to write everyday. (The moms have a damned good reason, though, and write when they can.) For me, the meds messed up my evening. Normally, I get up in the morning, shower, fix the cat breakfast (on the weekends when she’s at my house), fix myself breakfast and coffee, and then eat. While I eat, I check the news, read email, surf, etc.

Getting wound up.

On a normal day (a what???), I am writing by about 8am. Usually work until noon. Some mornings, when the juices are flowing, I might hit my 4,000 word target in 2-3 hours. Other days, longer.

Before the pandemic, I would go into town in the afternoon and run errands, or be part of a D&D group that met. Whatever.

Then, after dinner, I would do my editing. Fabulous Publisher Babe™ and I are each other’s first readers, so I have her stuff to go through first, then whatever comments have come back from her or my copy editors.

If nothing, I might watch a movie I have ripped, or read. Filling the well with creativity, as it were. I have finally reached the point where I can read fiction in my genre again for pleasure, but that took several years, because Writer-brain saw all the moving parts and got frustrated. Its not that I’m a better writer than some of these people, but frequently I am as good, and I would have done xxxxx better.

Or I’m reading something from the way-back, and THERE IS NO SETTING. Because Science Fiction is all about setting, but in those days they apparently just assumed a thinly-veiled USA/Anglo/US Military approach to everything.

I just finished reading Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke. I’ve never been a fan of his, because to me he had fantastically interesting ideas, and a much better grasp on science than just about anybody else working.

What he didn’t do was character or setting. I think I got about half a dozen words of character description from the whole novel, not counting pronouns indicating biological gender.

Neither here nor there. Asimov did the same thing, but Isaac included characters in his work, and that’s why I liked him. (Just finished rereading the whole Foundation Trilogy a few months ago.)

Shaggy story cut short, I had no brain last night. Not going to edit. Sure as hell couldn’t process well enough to read any of the non-fiction on my shelf, nor the research fiction. (Star Trek: The New Voyages, from 1976, when nobody believed that Trek was ever coming back.)

Got up this morning, and everything was creaky. Low grade yuck. And a mental fog that was a lot like sitting behind a foot of glass. Two extra heavy mugs of coffee, some aspirin, a lot of water, and eight hours later I have barely enough brains to contemplate words. These words, because I’m not there enough to pick up the latest Science Officer novel (Book 11) and try to keep up with Javier and Bethany getting snarky at each other.

I even had a nap today, after all that caffeine, so that should tell you something,

Did do a little writing earlier. Worked in my favor, because I had the character’s voice, and Fabulous Publisher Babe™ wanted me to slow-walk to the novel by adding 500 or so words of depth and description that hadn’t been there. Slow it down before picking up the pacing.

The rest of the novel was written with television show pacing, which means a pretty snappy movement to things, rather than taking chapters to discuss a meal. (Food porn has its place, but it has to be in service to the plot, rather than just info-dumping about all the research you did on what they ate.)

But I lost a day to being poisoned. A bit grumpy about that, because I have been world-building a whole new universe. Lots of interesting characters. Stories and plot lines reflecting new things I have been studying about how to tell The Heroine’s Journey (2020, by Gail Carriger, https://www.amazon.com/Heroines-Journey-Writers-Readers-Culture-ebook/dp/B08D5ZSNRB. Highly recommended.)

At least now I’m kinda back. Might do something really weird and write tonight, instead of waiting until tomorrow, but I also have a lot of editing to do and now is as good a time as any.

I know I can take a day off work, but I have to fight myself about it. I didn’t used to get sick in the old days, accumulating sick days until the bosses told me I had to use them.

Later, when I worked at joints with “Use it by Dec 31 or lose it” then I just took sunshine days occasionally. That way, when everybody else took their vacation that last week of the year, I could be in an office that was utterly silent and abandoned, maybe working, but maybe just goofing off with the other half dozen folks pulling the same scam.

What about you? How hard is it for you to take self-care days, when you aren’t really sick, but maybe shouldn’t be pushing?

How do you handle that niggling in the back of your mind?

Chesterton’s Fence

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Got a bit irked or maybe inspired this morning by a friend. They had a complaint about a fairly common saying that made no sense to them and went off on a rant that turned into a tirade by the time they were done. I won’t mention the topic, because that would out them too easily, but it got me to thinking about why they were so upset.

I’m pretty sure, without asking, that the subject was a colloquialism that didn’t grow up around here, wherever here happened to be for them. But the tirade was the interesting part.

I put a lot of it down to that late stretch of things when the pandemic is (hopefully) on the downhill slope. Folks are starting to get vaccines that work. The worst part of 2020 might be over. At the same time, it is not yet wise to toss your mask into the trash and go back to where you were two years ago. In Washington State, I am on a list, but I am in the LAST category that will get their shots. Before, that meant maybe as late as fall, but not it means that I ought to be able to get my shots by June 1, if all goes well.

There are still a lot of folks falling ill. And a lot of folks dying. The numbers are down, but not zero. There is time yet we have to deal with.

So folks are stressed. Stay stressed. And it comes out in frustration with the way things are now, when people see how they could be so much better, if only…

And that leads me to Chesterton’s Fence. President Kennedy liked to quote the man and his fence.

G.K. Chesterton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton) was a giant of a man, physically as well as intellectually. He is best known, however for his fence.

“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.”

Translated into a more modern vernacular, it deal with folks that want to change everything, because they don’t like the way it used to be. In this case, my friend was frustrated at a lot of other things, but ranted on this topic mostly because I don’t think they understood the point of the saying that had set them off.

As a result, all things had to change, because obviously something was WRONG!

Wasn’t, but my father always told me to never argue with a fool because bystanders couldn’t tell the difference.

So when you encounter a popular saying that is extremely old, my immediate conclusion isn’t to “fix” it, but to understand where it comes from.

In the context of Chesterton’s Fence, to understand why it was put up in the first place. The saying was an old one. Popular, but not local to my friend. Didn’t mean it meant anything less. I grew up with the saying, but I also knew what it meant, whereas they hit it cold this morning and bubbled over with rage and frustration.

These are frustrating times. I get that. You can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but still have to walk there.

Something irritates you and you simply over-react.

Stop and breathe instead. Think about it. Ask yourself why the fence was built there in the first place, because somebody else had a good reason at the time. Doesn’t mean you can’t take it down, but you need to know what purpose it serves before destroying it and making things worse.

We all over-react.

However, the important lesson these days is to stop and breathe. I have told more than one person lately that each of us gets up in the morning and decides if we will be helpful or toxic.

When you got out of bed, did you decide you wanted to be nice and friendly to complete strangers, or an asshole to everyone you encounter?

You make that decision. And you make it every morning. Every afternoon. You chose to be an asshole. To be toxic. To explode all over someone who didn’t do anything to warrant your vitriol at all besides not popping you in the gob when you got mouthy.

(In the internet age, far fewer people are getting the sort of pop in the gob that would teach them better manners around strangers, but that’s another topic for another time.)

Who did you decide to be this morning? That’s what it comes down to. Did you see Chesterton’s Fence standing arrogantly athwart your path and go into a destructive rampage? Because now the cows are out and wandering all over the countryside. Did you think only of yourself, rather than stopping to ask if what you were doing was helpful to others?

Don’t let the frustration overtake you. I understand the clarion call of rage as a tool. (Oh, trust me, I truly understand that concept.) But you get judged by total strangers for it. It becomes your reputation, and then you don’t get to make a better second impression on them, because they already know you are a hothead with a temper problem.

The world will get there. Rome was not built in a day, it did not fall in a day. It fell because people thought more of themselves than of others.

What have you done today to make the world a better place? Or worse?

Hurt Dogs Howl

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Part of my social media presence involves sharing silly things I find elsewhere. (I don’t share some of them, because the AI bots and South Asians hired to enforce things have a decidedly different political slant than I do, and its not worth the grief.)

At the same time, I share things I find uplifting. Most of my friends are artists, and a great many of them have unfortunately drank the silly kool-aid that says they must be miserable. Which is silly, but I see the world in a far different manner.

Whereas many of them approach their art with “I have to go write now…” grumbles, I wake up and think “I get to go write now!!!” I chose to be happy. Choose. They have not all made that choice yet.

So I try to uplift them.

Recently, I accidentally conducted an experiment in unconscious bias and assumptions. Posted something that shouldn’t have been controversial, but man, did a lot of people come out of the woodwork to verbally assault me.

And they picked the wrong day to try and engage me in a deep philosophical conversation, because I had to stop and not block folks cold. Turn them into un-people. (You don’t EVER get off my block list. I had a reason to put you on there, and it would take years of you proving otherwise, in other places, before I was willing to let bygones be bygones. Easier on my digestion)

Once I cooled off a little, I saw an interesting pattern to their commentary. A friend once told me “Hurt dogs howl loudest.”

I took that to mean that when you hit a sore spot, you get a bite back. And several folks bit back at me out of the blue. Like, for the first time ever some of them came at me with knives out, which in a couple of cases was more like being threatened by a kitten.

But I let it go. Watched. I do that. Watch. Follow your language and your behavior and judge you accordingly. I assume you do the same to me, but I try to be as authentic as I can, and behave myself around folks I don’t know that well.

Many of my friends on social media are folks I have never met in the real world. Doesn’t make them any less interesting to know, because it allows me to have conversations all over the world and learn things from interesting people in ways my grandparents couldn’t have even imagined.

But we’re not in the same room. I can’t watch your body language. All I have are your words. And your emoticons, if you chose to include any.

For me, that means an extra level of reserve is necessary, because I don’t know some of you that well. Or maybe I haven’t been IRL with you in years. Momma always raised me to be polite, at least until someone proved that they needed the sharp edge of the tongue.

Or, as a friend explained recently: “Never be the first asshole in the conversation.”

So I posted something uplifting, and a lot of hurt dogs howled. HOWLED!

I got to see folks suddenly outing themselves in ways I don’t think they really appreciated.

As a rule, every vibrant accusation can be interpreted as a projection of some sort. Lots of you were projectile vomiting all over my wall. Luckily, I was already angry enough not to engage. Not to dump your silly ass at a truck stop outside Kansas City and let you hitchhike home.

Considered it. Still do. Keeping score, at a dead minimum, because I can be pushed backwards off the table if you decide you have to get that much up in my face and start something. Sometimes, I have to walk away, because I don’t stop at simple retaliation when provoked like that. Easier to just take somebody to the wall immediately and put them down. Less risk to me later.

Haven’t had to destroy anybody in a long time isn’t the same thing as never done it. It was even necessary, that last time. Ugly, but necessary.

So the dogs got to howling. And I got to watch.

Then I got to wondering about the level of hurt. Shouldn’t have triggered folks, but they were already twitchy. Already itching for a fight on the topic. Chose my wall and my day to do it.

You ever stop and wonder what it says about you when you do that? What others hear when you howl?

I learned some interesting things about folks. Probably not what y’all intended, but we’re not in the same room. All I have are your word casting a shadow on the wall, and I must play the role of Plato, interpreting it.

So you howled. Some of the shit was so over the top I had to delete the comments, just so I didn’t decide to go back later and exact vengeance. It might have been innocent on your part.

Might not. Dunno. Gone forever now. Safer that way.

Left a few up, so I could go back later, scratching my head and going “Really? That’s who you are?”

Interesting social experiment. I’ll leave it at that and go about my day.

But I do have a question for y’all.

When I haven’t named you, explicitly or implicitly, but you still jump madly to your defense, snarling and biting, what does that say about you?

And why you howl?

Mind Mapping The Future

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About a decade ago, I worked at a company that used mind mapping software (don’t remember which one, but I loved it at the time). When the company went away, I could no longer find anything at a reasonable price, because the licenses were all expensive and annual.

Got out of the habit of mind mapping.

Fast forward to 2021. I have a new laptop that I am breaking in. Xubuntu 20 atop a Wintel Core I3. Cheap, but good enough because I was installing my own OS.

For those of you who have never installed Linux on a laptop, it can be a right pain in the ass. The thing that used to be BIOS goes by another name now, and most major hardware manufacturers lock it down hard. I presume Microsoft is paying them a lot of money for this.

Eventually, I found all the places I needed to unlock. (There are TWO of them today. I expect 3-4 by the next time I do this). Got the OS installed, and then brought everything up to stable tips. Usually a wise idea with Linux. Not the bleeding edge, but most of the security fixes.

Then I went looking for things to install that are not part of the Core Distro.

As part of my wandering around, I found FreeMind for Linux. Installed it and then forgot about it for a month. Because I’m like that.

Tonight, I stumbled across the icon and decided it was time to open and try to use.

Kinda like riding a bicycle, but it took me about an hour to suddenly remember why I loved mind mapping in the first place.

Start with a central node. Give it a name that indicates what the hell you think you’ll be doing. Add subs off that. And that. And that.

About the fourth map I opened, I called it “Unpublished Fiction” and started organizing things. I recently put the first seven Beyond the Mirror Collections up on my store for $0.99 to see if they would sell. That’s part of what triggered this, looking at all the short stuff I have written over the last two years and deciding that some of it needed to come out.

I’ve had stories in Boundary Shock Quarterly that never saw the light of day elsewhere. There have been four Blaze Ward Presents so far. That alone is 20 stories right now.

Then I began brain dumping on electronic white boards. I love mind mapping because I can just node things as I need. And open new maps if one grows so big that I need to take it as a thing, instead of part of something else.

I have a lot of things to send out into the world. More than I was really processing. I asked Fabulous Publisher Babe™ if she wanted me to use a template, or just build the next three volumes of Beyond The Mirror (8-10 at this point, all science fiction). I might need four, once I start the process of organizing for publication. That’s a lot of stuff.

My Patreon (patreon.com/blazeward) fans have read some of it. If you read Boundary Shock, you’ll see some.

A bunch of it hasn’t ever seen the light of day. Mostly because I wanted to get that far ahead in 2020, before any of us knew what the year would look like. My goal was 36 short stories. I wrote 50.

Some of it is even for sale on the store right now, just because.

We live in a strange future. I can write it, wrap it up, and publish it, without ever asking permission of some twit in New York City. If it sells, I get to keep all the money.

It took a mind map to make me really visualize how much stuff I needed to get out. You’ll get it cheap in the collections, because otherwise I would sell it for 0.99 each. Here I can curate stuff for cheaper and call it good. Maybe push it out to the major distributors. Maybe not.

It you are a visual thinker like me, you owe it to yourself to look into mind maps. Yell if you need a quick primer. I am not an audio learner. I knew that in college, where I took complicated hieroglyphics for notes. Worse, my mom and I would take at least one class a semester together (usually upper level philosophy courses), and she would borrow my notes, study them, and then take tests. Took her a while, because I would write whole paragraphs on the fly without vowels, because I was in a hurry and we didn’t have laptops in the classroom in those terrible old days. (I was nerdy early, but still didn’t have a laptop until the early 90s.)

Mind map, if you can. I remember how well I stayed organized in those days, because it went onto a map, and then got moved around as I dealt with it, handed it off to the person who would deal with it, and then checked it off lists. (The joys of middle management, when you work with a pair of literal geniuses as peers, when your Director expects you to translate them into English occasionally.)

Expect new fiction soon. Expect more gushing about mind mapping. I have found a tool I lost a decade ago and forgot how much I loved it. Spent the last decade using Notepad++ as a poor substitute. Still have a document I first opened in 2011 that I use on a daily basis, if that gives you any ideas.

Y’all have fun. It’s snowing around here, having been 50F six hours ago.

shade and sweet water

blaze

West of The Mountains, WA

We’re all stressed…

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I get that. For Americans with any empathy at all, the last year has been a hard one, as they listened to the medical professionals and stayed home, wore masks, and cared about others, especially when other folks with no humanity at all threw fits about personal freedom and spread disease everywhere.

I do not have sympathy when those folks catch it, by the way. By now we know what causes it and how to stay safe. Not everyone can be safe, because they have jobs that cannot be done from home, unlike science fiction writers and middle managers.

So they have to deal with folks. Bad folks. People willing to put total strangers at risk.

Assholes.

I’ll talk about my real feelings for those folks elsewhere. Today I want to talk about stress. Your stress.

I have noticed that most people seem to be approaching their breaking point (again?) right about now. Staying home all the time instead of spending afternoons in a coffee shop, or shopping, or just visiting friends.

A lot of my friends these days exist online. Many of them are people I’ve never actually met in the flesh, but I still consider them friends. I have listened to their troubles and their victories. I have cheered for them and hurt with them.

And I’ve noticed some changes that probably warrant talking about.

When folks get stressed, their behavior changes. I was raised in an environment where I withdraw in the face of verbal or emotional abuse. I explained it an internet friend the other day as being willing to be pushed backwards off the table rather than fight someone. I meant to him that if you come after me and I don’t like you, I’ll just walk away. Its only when I feel personally threatened that you’ll see the dark side of me. I buried him pretty good a long time ago, but a few folks remember.

As the old saying goes from a book I enjoyed a long time ago: “Oh, I understand evil, Mistress. I’ve BEEN evil.”

I have done a lot of things I feel bad about from my younger days (call it prior to moving to Seattle in ‘97 as a safe rounding spot. Close enough). But I don’t have to fight every quarrel some dipshit wants to bring to my door. You don’t either, but a lot of folks have been in survival mode for so long now that they have kinda forgotten that.

Stress for many people turns into aggression. I get that. I’ve taken to just doing the whole 30-days-snoozing thing on social media for certain folks when they get wound up, after I spent 2020 just unfriending and blocking people when they got unruly. Total strangers, even, when I saw them posting something on somebody else’s wall that convinced me that they had nothing useful to ever say to me. I’m sure I’ve eliminated a few business and career opportunities that way, but my soul is worth more than your money.

But the aggression isn’t always a useful reaction. Its the fight-or-flight instinct. I get that. Hard-wired.

You’ve been running scared for a long time and sometimes think that you are suddenly cornered, wherein you need to come out biting and screaming.

You don’t. Everyone else is in the same boat, ninety-nine percent of the time. They are just as stressed, and not reading emotional language well. Nobody is.

Take a deep breath. Remember that your real friends won’t care if you take a few personal days. If you drop off the face of the earth for a week. I have a friend that I have not seen in the flesh in almost a decade, and that was breakfast as I was driving through Wichita in 2012. (I think. Don’t quote me on dates, Bob.) Prior to that, I last saw him in 1996. Lost track of him more than once over the decades, and worked to find him again each time.

You could do that in the old days. Just disappear. I did it twice. Harder now.

But he and I send each other random emails and Buckaroo Banzai jokes every once in a blue moon. You don’t have to be everything to everyone, every minute of the day. Remember that.

Relax.

Breathe out, and then in. Let some of that crazy bleed off. You don’t need it.

We are at a point where you know people who have gotten the vaccine. When you can see a light in the distance, marking the point where you’ll be able to hug a random stranger without being afraid that one of you will end up dead or facing medical bankruptcy. Where you’ll walk in the open air without fear.

I expect it will be summer. We’re busy catching up with people now, and by the hot days most of the people who want to be safe will have gotten it. Plague rats will continue to demand the freedom to sicken populations because they have no empathy for their fellow humans, and I cannot do anything about that except avoid them.

My plan is to excise those people from my existence, because they are simply too dangerous to know. Certainly to hang out with, because they don’t see not-killing other people as a cost worth bearing.

You should also let them go. Metaphorically kiss them on both cheeks from a socially distant vista. Maybe electronically.

But let them go. You cannot help them. You can only help yourself to be better tomorrow than you were today. To take care of yourself, because it will be over soon and you can relax.

Then you can breathe.

And fly…

Lazarus: Return

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When I set out, I had no idea where I was going with this series. Literally.

I’ve talked about it before now. Just laying in the tub one night soaking and relaxing, and the opening words of Chapter One of Book One (Escape) hit me. I had to get up, dry off, get dressed, and start typing.

Had no idea where I was going. Or who the characters were. Chapter One just pretty much fell out of me as you’ve read it. This is a bit out of character for me the writer. Usually, I open a new word document and go.

But I knew that Lazarus was going to be weird, so I just ran with it.

Book One (Escape) gave me the chance to introduce all sorts of new alien species. And make humans over into Space Orcs, following up on an old joke from a friend of mine. (“Would you stop and say hello to us?”)

When it came time for Book Two (Return) it was obvious that I also needed to explore some thoughts on human cultures, and introduce some human characters. Oluchi Pryce was one such. I drew visual inspiration for him directly from Donald Glover’s Lando in the recent Solo movie, down to the cape. Didn’t use the character so much, but did make him a gambler and card sharp and a gigolo suddenly faced with “aging out” and having to do something new/else with his life.

Grace is modeled on a woman I knew but didn’t date, back when I was a bouncer in a cowboy bar in Riverside, California in the mid-90s. She worked as a professional dancer at night, but didn’t have any cocaine habits. (Lots of those girls got addicted to something, she explained to me.She was about to pay off her mother’s house, had a new Jeep and a new motorcycle paid off.) During the day, she studied various martial arts. (I was into a form of Vietnamese Kung Fu in those days which was why we bonded. Wish I’d kept up on it, but that’s a different story for another time.) My friend was Hispanic/Comanche, she told me once, which gave her an exotic look to go with being 6’1 and built like a middle linebacker in the shoulders and curvy hot babe everywhere else.

Xiuying is modeled after a couple of guys I knew from the old days as well. Both Marines. Both hard-ass killers in their own ways.

We take space adventure for granted in science fiction, but I’ve heard more than a few people complain that most American SF is US American culture (White, Christian, Euro, etc.) just put on a space ship like a tv show from the 1950s. So when it came time to think about things, I turned everything on its head, and made my rebels a group of colonies that had largely been drawn from the regions between Brazil and Central America. Not a lot and not heavy, but with a distinct look, as well as more of an emphasis on Catholicism than you might be expecting from one of my books.

But it fit Lazarus, so I ran with it.

You’ve had a chance to read Return now, so you’ve met these folks. And seen what sorts of trouble I think you might run into if and when we actually met an intelligent, tool-using, space-faring species.

(Hint: It’s not likely to be pretty, but that’s a story for another day as well.)

Rebellion is coming up next.

We run through seven novels with Lazarus, Addison, Eha, and Aileen, plus a bunch of others you will meet as we go forward. Book Seven is at the First Reader now, and will come out in July. Six is at the copy editor and I need to go over corrections to Five, so we’re in motion.

This is a story about heroes and villains, but mostly about coming to understand the old saying that “Blood of brotherhood is thicker than waters of the womb.” This is a long arc about families of choice, where we decide who our friends and family are, based on people we like and respect, rather than being forced to deal with family.

I don’t generally get along with most of my blood family, but I’ve been making a few new efforts since my Mom died last year. Trying, but we’re all adults, in different parts of the country with different lives. My wife’s extended family is much closer bonded, and just accepted me as another one of them because we’re all artists of some sort.

As with all things, the key to happiness is to be where you are welcomed and wanted, so I need to remind each and every one of you to look around and see if it could be better were you are, or if you should maybe be someplace else.

Someplace where they like you…

I Have Eight Spoons

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It used to be ten, but we’re down to eight now.

I’m speaking metaphorically, of course, before you manage to pull your undies so tight that they cut off your circulation. It used to be that I had an amount of work I could generally accomplish in a day. Write all morning. Errands in the afternoon. Editing and publishing related stuff in the evening.

It worked.

Then the pandemic hit. I held out for a while and it was fine. I’m used to sustaining my end of things through hell or high water, because I had those kinds of jobs for a good chunk of my day job career.

But lately I’m finding myself worn out sooner. I hit a point in the evening where the brain just shuts off and rolls over. Out of spoons. Other folks have gone through it, but maybe didn’t have a vocabulary that let them express it.

Stress. A straight punishment can be survived because it is predictable. You develop coping and defensive mechanisms. (And God knows I’ve got a few from my past.)

It’s the randomness that knocks you off kilter. And me. The not ever knowing what to expect next. My last couple of day jobs used to be like that, because I was a middle manager type dedicated to hunting chaos down and fixing it. Boxing it in. Limiting it. I was really good at it.

I used to say “Chaos offends me.” but at the same time, I’ve always been good at surfing chaos. (Note the F, as opposed to the V.)

But at work, that was predictable chaos, if you could call it that. I had certain channels of stupid shit that would come across my desk. Or long lead times to identify solutions when shit was going to go sideways. And I was good at fixing it.

I don’t have control here.

I can write. I can publish. I can watch my income and sales numbers bounce all over the damned place to the point I wonder if I’ll have to go get a day job of some sort. Not going back to what I had, but part-time minimum wage kinds of things, just so I can turn the brain off for a while and use muscles instead.

Predictability.

Others have talked about their feelings of recovery, now that an attempted coup has failed and we’re left cleaning up the mess from folks who have no interest in discussing their part in attempting to overthrow the government of the United States. Or the years they spent up until now trying to break it.

I was not surprised that they tried. I’ve been expecting it since I wrote a political science paper in 1988 entitled “The Fall of the American Republic in 2020.” (Yes, I really did. He gave me a B+ on it, but I don’t feel like looking him up in his retirement (or he might be dead by now) in order to say “I told you so.”)

I’m glad they failed. And a little surprised for reasons I have talked about elsewhere and which will cost you beers to have me explain later.

I need to recover. The stress has been there, but I held it down. Would not admit it. Don’t know what it will take for me to slide past all this. Probably orange jumpsuits on a few of the fuckers who deserve it.

“If more people went to prison for this shit, fewer people would go to prison for this shit.”

But I abide. Hopefully, it all starts getting better, now that we’ve passed a crest of history that will be the end of certain history books and the beginning of others.

I can survive on eight spoons, now that I have finally understood that I only have that many for now. It was the confusion as to why I was suddenly so tired all the time that threw me off. I already cut way back on the things I was trying to do, because there were certain topics I didn’t want to write about. Too dark. Too depressing. Too close to home.

Bad juju.

So now we are really at the dawn of 2021. The world gets to change again, and hopefully criminals and anarchists will be put in small, concrete boxes where we can laugh at them and taunt them like the losers they are.

There should be no mercy for attempting to overthrow the government. In the ancient times, the term used was “Neck or Crown” because if you tried to kill the king, you either succeeded or your life was forfeit. They should not get a stern talking to, any more than Julius and Ethel Rosenberg did. In fact, that is the legal precedent for aiding and abetting enemies of the state, and I feel like we need to introduce a few dozen folks to it.

Not all thousand or so who really deserve it, mind you. Most of them are weak-minded fools who honestly just need better mental health coverage to get them the help that might spring them out of their delusions. But there is a hard core of folks that are evil, and need to be dealt with.

Permanently.

I can’t go out to eat these days because folks like that refuse to take the pandemic serious. I was at the grocery the other day, and half the people I saw were without masks, in a county where the mandate is everyone. The store could have been fined $5000 per infraction, and a few have, but those fuckers don’t care for anybody but themselves. Same with the coup. They didn’t want a country where non-whites might be granted equal rights, and were willing to burn the whole damned thing down rather than share.

And that’s why I got so angry, but I can’t express that anywhere but in my writing. I have to hold it inside and just smile. Just write. Just abide.

But that takes spoons out of me. “I can do this thing, but it will cost me” is a favorite phrase of an old acquiaintance, and something I have taken to heart.

They say pick your battles, and I try not to fight that many any more. Can’t.

Just don’t have enough spoons to save the world right now.

Not sure when I will.

After The Darkness

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I wrote a blog post yesterday, but realized as soon as I started that I was too angry to publish it.

Yesterday was the American Inauguration, and the end of the Trump Presidency. The third Wednesday in January of 2021, when the first one was an attempted coup and the second one was the impeachment for the first one.

I am not looking forward to next week.

But I also went ahead and posted it. Sort of. People wanted to read my vaguebooking, so I put it up on a download site with an expiration at the end of this month. Wasn’t expecting the number of folks to read and comment. Nor the support.

Couldn’t post it on FB. They would have read the inflammatory language and given me at least a 30-day vacation. Maybe longer. Didn’t want to post it to my wall back home, because that feeds out to Amazon, Goodreads, and other places eventually. Too public.

As a writer, I have to self-censor to some extent. Doubly so when I write in a category of genre (mostly space opera science fiction) where a good chunk of my readers are frequently to the right of me. Sometimes a ways to the right, but that’s me shifting leftward a little over the last thirty years as the Overton Window moved into deep right field.

I am a whore. We all are, at the end of the day, because we have to cash a paycheck dependent on someone else. Most of you work for some company that might fire you for your politics, if they could. I don’t have that sort of a boss. (I married mine and kind of slept my way to the top, but that’s an entirely different joke.)

Instead, I have fans. My job is to entertain them, first and foremost. To provide them stories that encourage them to keep coming back with money for me to sustain my lifestyle. Past that, I try to make them think. My stories are not generally running on rails, at least compared to most.

Or if they do, I try to have interesting and different characters trying to solve their problems. (And no Chosen One stories. I hate those, because the gods are always assholes.)

But you know you are in a Blaze Ward novel when somewhere, somebody is sticking it to the Man. That’s my politics. The Underdog fighting the bully.

Others bring different things to the table. That’s why fiction is so much fun and you can always find something to read, because we are all different.

But I was angry yesterday. And I bled it all out on paper. More than one person noted the visceral feelings I inspired, but I warned everyone ahead of time and made them jump through a few hoops to read it, so only my friends (and deeply committed deep-cover enemies, of which I probably still have a few) would read it.

Because I don’t want to alienate everyone. Sure, I have air-locked a couple of former fans over the years, but the guy who defends his right to wear his Klan hood to the grocery store as a political statement on wearing masks against COVID was just an asshole.

Better, he told me that he couldn’t be racist because he was born “white trash.” His words. Can’t argue with someone like that. (You can imagine how he voted in 2020, can’t you?) Hell, I’m pretty sure he bought one entire series of my novels after that (at full price) just so he could leave 2-star reviews on them. Somebody did.

You have to be deeply committed to your particular insanity to “show someone” like that when they throw you out of the party.

And I don’t do it often, but Confederate Apologists are bullies. And if you have read ANY of my stories, you know how I feel about bullies. The only fights I got into in grade school involved me stopping bullies from picking on other people. Including the time I beat up my best friend. (At the time, anyway. That went south quickly.)

So I write. And not all of it can be published. Shit happens. I’ll even share some of it, but right now my contribution to a more polite society doesn’t involve punching people in the face. Or rather, not punching some people in the face is my contribution to a more polite society, because they frequently deserve it.

We have reached an age where bullies are emboldened to abuse people. This is a problem because structural racism still lingers in this country. The BLM protests last summer and how they were handled, compared to the Capital Insurrection two weeks ago, tells you all you need to know about the police power structure in this country.

That’s part of why I write Science Fiction, because otherwise, I would have very strong opinions about the modern age and what’s wrong with it. We are corrupt, as a nation and as a society. We can fix it, but a lot of people profit from it and don’t want to give up their perks. Others would rather die or go to jail than allow the rest of humanity equality under the law.

And mind you, this is me much calmer today, so you can imagine what yesterday sounded like.

What contortions have you been forced into, in order to not be fully ostracized? I can list mine, but we’d be here all day.

I will suggest that if your friends make you do those things, you have the wrong friends. If your job drives you that crazy, it might be time to find a better place to work.

Change is coming, so things might get better. I don’t want to go back to what we had two years ago, because that was flawed and broken. I want something better. I want a world where nobody is hungry, or cold, or alone.

In science fiction, sometime I can even show you what that looks like.

Eating Healthy 2021

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So I do a twice-monthly writer newsletter as part of my social media existence. Other people do more, some do less. We all have our comfort zone. Some folks do FB. Other IG. Or Twitter. The key is to find that thing that you can do and largely ignore the others because that’s a rabbit hole that you can drown in if you aren’t paying attention.

Along the way, my regular blog went from more than weekly to less. Or rather, the quarterly newsletter went monthly, then twice monthly. And I added a Patreon Blog every Monday. And I added a second newsletter for Indie Writers (Milestone) in addition to the personal one. Something had to give.

But I try to keep this blog alive, because there are (hopefully) folks out there listening.

It’s Monday, the beginning of 2021. First day back to the office job for a lot of folks. (I never generally take a day off, but I have a better job than most of you.) We have emerged from the weirdest Christmas most of you will hopefully ever know, and now are looking at a world on the verge of getting its shit back together, or completely coming apart. (I will let you know in June.)

Most people eat too much food and chocolate over the holidays, and end up gaining a lot of weight that they may and may not manage to lose again later. And we’re all getting older, so things don’t work as well as they used to and we don’t burn calories as fast.

Was having a chat with some friends the other day and one fellow, all of about nine months older than me but a former Rifleman and life-long martial artist, was talking about how badly his joints hurt in the morning and how much fun he had trying to go down stairs in the morning for that first mug of coffee. As in, maybe faceplant along the way and kill himself.

One of the things that marks me and Fabulous Publisher Babe™ apart from a lot of folks I know is that when we identify a problem, we figure out a solution and implement it. We call it ‘becoming someone new’ to mark that the old person needed to change. And it happens several times per year.

For me, a few years ago I was identified with stomach issues and the doctor suggest OTC Omeprozole. Worked, so I take it every morning, along with a handful of dried cranberries, because I’ve had kidney infection issues for the last thirty years. And I’m 51 now, so I added a men’s multivitamin to the daily mix a few years ago.

My breakfast usually consists of a stew I make each week and toss in a casserole dish. Meat from the day old corner that I freeze, usually pork or beef, along with a chicken thigh I get at the Japanese market. Sometimes I get lucky and find lamb, goat, or veal. I add fat, either duck or ham. Bones when I have them, or bone-in cuts of meat. And then I have about 12-15 different frozen bags of veggies. Kale, spinach, dandelion greens, mustard greens, celery, bok choy, carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, red cabbage, some of those salad mixed that are good, etc.. Add vinegar, garlic, fish sauce, mustard, tomato paste, anchovy paste, cayenne, and other spices in a random rotation.

Healthy, because I get all manner of trace vitamins and minerals on a weekly basis, and the flavor rotates regularly. (I still get a couple of takeout breakfasts from Krain Corner to help them while they are closed. When they open I’ll go back to archery with a stop there first once a week.)

The message I want you to think about is eating healthy. Making little changes. She reminds me that I had too much sugar in my diet, because I like sweets and used to have both a big dollop of honey and a bit of molasses with each mug of coffee. So I started to wean myself. Cut both back. Ran out of molasses and won’t get more. Down to maybe a quarter of the honey I used to consume.

I had originally gotten into honey because local honey helps with allergies. It failed badly this past year, but then we discovered that I might be allergic to daisies, and I had a serious book mold problem, because we picked up a couple of room purifier air suckers, and I’ve gone from sneezing all day to maybe not sneezing today at all. And let me tell you how weird THAT is for me.

The other thing we added recently, and this is what I told my buddy, is that I have started making gummy treats as a delivery mechanism. Fruit juice, maple syrup, citric acid, and plain gelatin following the original recipe, to which I add Hyaluronic Acid, Chondroitin Sulfate, and Gluocosamine HCL.

I messed up my left knee last year working on the barn roof. Never went to the doctor, but it felt like I stretched an ACL as far as I could without actually tearing anything.

Started taking just regular Hyaluronic Acid in capsules, and within two weeks the knee pain went from a three to a one. Some days to a zero. HA apparently acts as a joint lubricant, and OMG was it wonderful.

Circling this shaggy dog story around, I do two newsletters. On the 15th, we talk about the latest publishing news, where I have published a new novel on the 10th. But on the 1st, we do the Anti-Stodgy/Redneck Chef newsletter, where we talk about all the things I do to stay young of mind, heart, and body. And the weird recipes I have had to come up with because she and I have some strange allergies. (She’s functionally Keto and Paleo, but also partially vegan, as she is allergic to eggs, dairy, and few other things. I have to work to come up with new recipes, so I share them.)

This isn’t to shame you, although I suppose I ought to, just a bit, because soda pop is probably terrible bad for you, both in terms of calories as well as ingredients. But a small change now will make your life better or at least not worse in a year, in five years, and a generation.

At 51, I want to be still writing for another forty years or so, and maintain a crazy pace of weird and exciting entertainment for as long as I can, with one of my adult grandsons and one of her teenage grandnieces eventually being groomed (if interested) into running our sprawling publishing empire.

To do that, I need to eat healthy. Most of you know what that looks like, but refuse to actually make those changes because it might be too hard, or means giving up something you love. I understand. I tossed an unopened box of Spree into the trash over the weekend. Anyone who knows me (really knows me) is standing there utterly agog right now at those words.

But I want to be still a pain in the ass when I’m eighty, so I need to make changes now. Eating healthy. Weaning myself off of bad foods and sweets. Trying new things so I don’t get stodgy.

Having fun.

Get off your ass and look in your refrigerator and cupboard. What one thing could you start to wean now, that would mean less weight this time next year? One fewer Coke daily? One fewer dingdong? Stop eating bread, or cut your consumption in half?

How do you stay alive so you can rub it in all those faces a generation hence?

And how much fun can we have along the way?

2021 Aspirations

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I am not going to call this anything silly like “Goals” because 2021 is likely to be even more messy than 2020 was. We went into this past year with the impeachment (remember those halcyon days of innocence?), and that brought with it an expectation that sales would take something of a hit, as people would be focused on the news instead of space opera or mystery.

From there, it would be a presidential election, and those are always good for a hit on the reading side for the same reason, running from about Sep 1 to about Dec 1. Every four years like clockwork.

And then…

I’m not generally in Kindle Unlimited. (Exception: we put the Star Dragon novels up as an experiment this fall. Slightly better than Meh results at this point, but I digress.) Folks were suddenly home a lot starting in March, as the world came to grips with an unknown disease and shut down to try to fight it.

On the plus side, people needed entertainment. On the minus side, they tended to binge on various television shows, to the point that they fought and often defeated the various level monsters at the ends of Netflix, Hulu, etc.

However, a lot of people were also out of work, or saw their hours cut, or had greatly heightened concern about income. Kindle Unlimited (an all you can eat service) folks saw a big jump in page reads, anecdotally, because folks could do that without spending any more money than they were right now. Same with the streaming services. GORGE yourself now. Save your money.

So my sales were down considerably for much of the year. We’d budgeted for bad, but this was worse, so we cut expenses to the bone everywhere. No more audio books. No more translations. No eating out, except that I dedicated a portion of my monthly budget to one of my favorite restaurants and got take out regularly to help them stay in business.

One bright spot was an email from the US Government’s Small Business Administration offering us a loan of up to $25,000 USD on incredible terms. We took out $9,000 to get the next two Science Officer books (3 & 4) translated into German. (Look up “Velocity of Money” sometime to understand why things like that are useful.) Those will be coming out shortly, and have helped with my German readers, as those folks like a good space pirate story and many of them are bi-lingual enough to step over and read my English-language catalog as well. (Germany moved up to my second largest nation in both sales and income in 2020, displacing the rest of the English-speaking world along the way, behind only the US.)

I did manage twelve novels published monthly. Plus a few others. Four issues of Boundary Shock Quarterly. Two episodes of Blaze Ward Presents. 1.4 million words written. Fifteen novels. Fifty-one shorter pieces of various flavors.

It was a good year for writing, because my words was something I could control. Had to put some projects to the side, either for economic, social, or psychological reasons. Hoping to cycle back to them at some point.

So now we’re endgaming 2020 and I need to look at 2021. I will talk about aspirations, but not concrete goals, because there is a lot of putting-back-together yet to do.

Staying on the one novel per month pace. About a quarter of the way into the seventh and last Lazarus novel. Those should come out Jan-Jul of 2021. Got a lot of other science fiction/space opera novels in the can right now, and will continue writing more on those series, as well as circling back to The Science Officer. And maybe even another Dominion book or two, depending.

I have the first two novels of a sword and sorcery fantasy trilogy written, taking place after the end of Rebels. In addition, I have a new sword and sorcery fantasy novel written for what might turn into a series at some point, but this book stands on its own.

All of those will come out off schedule sometime next year. What that means is that I will have science fiction every month, AND ALSO will drop other things as well, so everyone will just have to pay attention. They will be obviously fantasy and not SF by cover, blurb, and such, so anyone whining that they expected ray guns when the cover is an orc in plate mail with a sword in hand, well, they get what mockery they deserve.

In addition, I wrote what was very obviously Book One of a straight Urban Fantasy series a while back. It will come out on its own, and hopefully I will have the time and inclination to write more of them.

And then: I just finished an Occult Detective novel set in London in 1924. First person to read commented that I got all the tropes right and entertained the hell out of him, so that’s a good sign. Will write more about Augustus Dexter Derlyth next year, and put those out. Unlike the Urban Fantasy, the Occult Detective stands on its own perfectly well.

I even have some straight Action/Adventure. One set in 1977 qualifies as “historic” and the other was intentionally set in 2018 so I could control the timeline and take into account the pandemic when it hit.

From there: I have a crap ton of serial short fiction I have written. Kumiko. Yasmin. Peter Najjar. Pizzafarmer. Flight Officer Brannon. Etc. Some of those will come out individually. Eventually I will have enough to do series collections (my goal is always more than 40,000 words combined so it weighs like a novel.) Already do with Yasmin. The others might need fortifying.

I even wrote a Hard-boiled private detective this year. Gunderson. Set in 1955 and about as weirdly Spec fiction as it gets, as I intentionally set out to explore every weird trope I could get. Think Kolchak, The Night Stalker. Gunderson might be his dad or something. We do science fiction, horror, paranormal, fantasy, and even straight historic mystery. Let me put it to you this way, any sort of weird shit might walk through his door with a case, so we’ve so far explored Cthulhu, super heroes, aliens, Hellenic gods, kaiju, and I still have list of maybe twenty others to go after at some point.

Looked at a different way, I probably published about a million and a half words in the last two years, and wrote closer to three million (just on either side of 1.4m twice). That leaves a lot of stuff in the trunk.

Some of it remains in the trunk, mind you. Not every experiment works. I have a set of five short stories intended to be a serial, but by the time I got to the end of five, it was obvious I had a problem. The characters were solid. The setting deep. The problems obvious and fun. But the tone had shifted radically, from rather light and silly at the start to kinda dark and ominous by the end of the fifth one, which in no way was the end.

Trunked, but I like everything about it so much that I do intend to start cold with the whole mess at some point and do a hard redraft, playing for the epic scale of what I originally intended. It will be a fun series, but it also has to be novels, instead of serial shorts. Too much going on. And eventually I stumbled into the epicness of the core. Way bigger than I thought on page one, so I have already led my readers astray by page two, based on where I intended to go in the end.

So I have science fiction/space opera aspirations in 2021. Lazarus 7 (Alliance) will be done close enough to count as a 2020 title. I have two Giles novels done (of five, I think). Three books in the Air Pirates of Cyrenaica (of five in this arc). Book One post-apoc “steampunkish” novel of a series. The first novel in a new Phil Kosnett series, set after Jessica Keller concludes in Petron. The first Kincaide novel (originally three, I already know there will be five, but book one clocked in at 165k and they will all be that heavy.)

On top of that, I have notes for an early 19th Century “Aeropunk” series of HARD sf. A new dark epic series tuckerizing Alison Kosnett (wife of the Ambassador) because she was feeling left out. (Turning her into a badass assassin chick.) And a couple of other series I want to undertake at some point.

There will be more Science Officer. (The response to The Bryce Connection and Alien Seas has been far in excess of what I expected, so thank you.) More Handsome Rob. More Greyson Leigh.

Sometime in the spring, you will see the first part of a sequel to Fairchild. Background: in 2018, I went to the Fiction River Anthology Workshop, like I used to do every year. I didn’t participate, because those things were an arms race, but Fabulous Publisher Babe™ always did. That year, one of the themes was “Dragons,” but the editor specified that she wanted stories where the dragon was a character, and not just a villain/menace/monster.

[Hint: she was not entirely happy with the results.]

I always sat in the back of the room in the evenings, learning how to be an editor from a cast of industry experts with more than a century of combined experience. Listened to her ranting about things and how unhappy she was with the outcome, but she did manage to make it work eventually, mostly by moving things around and editing her own theme call to cover more of the stories. They weren’t bad, just not what she wanted.

I got inspired, listening to her. Went home the next week and wrote a short story called “Strawberry Dragon.” It was the next Fairchild piece, originally intended to bridge to the next novel. Sent it to that editor (a personal friend) with the email subject line “This is all your fault.” and explained how the story had come into being.

Two days later, she writes back. “I want this for my anthology!”

Uhm… Okay? Sure. Yours.

Would have been my first professional sale ever.

Past tense.

As with everyone else, the world fell out from under Fiction River, and they reverted all the stories. Or rather, she asked Fabulous Publisher Babe™ to publish Dragons on bundle rabbit as a royalty share, if the writers were willing. Enough of them were, and my story was included. It will come out in the spring as the next “Cutter’s Final Cut” (I also had a story in Unlikely Heroines, from the same source, but that was me filling in with a story when she had space, rather than being part of the original.)

So, fast forward. I went ahead and just picked up the story from the end of the short and wrote the rest of it into a novel. Strawberry Dragon. Will come out in the summer, probably next after the Lazarus series completes. So August, I think. Don’t hold me to that, as these are all aspirations, and not concrete goals.

“Always write the publishing schedule in pencil.”

So that’s where my brain is coming up on the end of 2020. Got lots of stuff to publish. Even the start of a schedule, but nothing set in stone. You’ll get what I can do, and I’ll keep writing like mad to try to get all these stories out of my head and onto paper.

You will have something like 16-20 novels to pick from. Four Boundary Shock (already have three of the stories written). One Blaze Ward Presents (going to annual now, instead of semi-annual for reasons.)

Stay tuned here and on my newsletter. Listen in on my Monday blog post on Patreon as I discuss the nuts and bolts of my week.

And have a lovely holiday season.