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Not Yet Post-Corona View

6/8/2020

I can't believe it's been a month since my last entry. Well, yes I can, since I see the date of my last one, but the month went by way too fast.
We're a weird species. We go to work and hope the day goes by quickly. The we hope the week gets over pretty quickly. Then we wonder how come the month went by so quickly.
What writing time I've had has been dedicated to Lying Swords and submitting a couple of short stories, and editing those specifically for the market I'm submitting to.
I ran out of new stuff to read so I've picked up a couple of old paperbacks I haven't read in at least ten years. I finished Priest-Kings of Gor and I'm now working on Beasts of Gor. These are two of very many Gor books by John Norman.
The basic tenet of these stories is that they happen on the planet Gor—the counter-earth. The planet is in the exact same orbit as Earth and always on the exact opposite side of the sun. Gor was brought to the solar system by a technologically advanced species called Priest-Kings. The first book in the series, Tarnsman of Gor, reveals a lot of this plus details.
These stories are told in first person by Tarl Cabot, a man of Earth who was brought to Gor in one of the voyages of acquisition. The plots and characters of these novels are generally very entertaining. On the downside, Norman is obsessed with a certain philosophy of sex and the relationship between men and women. Each successive book, it seems, has more and more words devoted to this theory until it becomes tiresome. Since I've read Beasts of Gor once before I find it easy to skip over the pedantry and get to the meat of the story.
Norman has an interesting writing style, or style of expression, that is both unique, entertaining and annoying. I have copied it a little in my longer works, not intentionally applying the style while realizing that I am doing it, if that makes sense. Norman has a PhD in philosophy, which helps explain the long paragraphs of message. But his stories and world-building are excellent in the first half-dozen or so, and then the story-telling declines. I wish I had more than the two I do have.
Here's a link to the Wikipedia article on Norman which includes a list of his 35 (!) Gor books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Norman
It has been a weird year so far (like this is news)and it just got more so. The corona virus has clobbered the economy, sports, and caused the death of over 100,000 Americans and it ain't done yet. And then George Floyd was murdered by a cop, and other cops not only allowed it to happen but made sure no non-cop interfered. They've been charged with crimes. Good. I don't know if Chauvin intended to kill George Floyd, but it was quite clear that neither he nor his compatriots had the slightest concern for the welfare of the victim and were quite satisfied with the situation that lasted for nine minutes.
Now we have demonstrations, peaceful and violent, trying to get systematic change in the treatment of black Americans by society in general and police specifically.
And no matter how they try to spin the view, neither the Trump administration nor his ass-kissing political supporters dispute that peaceful protestors, exercising the Constitutional rights, were gassed (either tear gas or smoke) and chased away by violent means so that President Trump could walk across the area to stand in front of a church and hold a Bible upside down to have his picture taken.
One more viewpoint: in April, gas prices in Wisconsin flirted with $1 per gallon--$1.29 in Prairie du Chien. Now, less than two months later, it's $2.14. Sure, some of that is because the demand has increased.
However...
Earlier in the year Russia and Saudi Arabia were waging an oil price war. Gas prices were down because oil prices were down—way down—because of this price war. Then the price war ended and prices climbed quickly. Why did that war end? Because President Trump convinced those countries to stop the war because the billion-dollar oil companies based in the U.S. were losing money.
Trump took care of his billionaire friends, bragged about it, and left us to pay for it.
Remember that when you buy gas in November, and when you vote.

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A Corona Rant

5/7/2020

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Hello. Everybody safe and well? As I'm sure you know there are people protesting the current shut-downs and social distancing. They're actually protesting to have a better chance to contract the virus that may hospitalize or even kill them. Beyond that, they're protesting to have a better chance to contract the virus and pass it on to others so the others, including their own family members, can come down with COVID-19 and maybe be hospitalized or even killed.
I'd like to think that American citizens were not this stupid in the past, but I'd probably be wrong.
I saw a Facebook posting about how it seems the virus can be caught in bars and hair salons and movie theaters and restaurants, but not at gas stations, grocery stores or hardware stores. This was a sarcastic objection to the shutting-down of some places but not others. I hope people reading that, or producing that, recognize the difference between essential services and non-essential services. Buying gasoline, food, or tools is essential. Getting your hair cut, eating out, or seeing movies, going bowling, etc. is not. It gives you all an idea of how spoiled we've become as a people. Our entertainment and leisure rivals illness-free living for importance.
So, for you protesters and whiners, everybody is going through the same thing. It's tough on those who've become unemployed, especially in the leisure and hospitality business. And I'm still working, so you may think I have no idea how bad it is.
Well, I do. I was unemployed for a full year back last century, and at that time we had three children. We had to move to a cheaper home and file for food stamps. Our car was repossessed. So I do know how rough it can be. But those of you who are just tired of the shut-down, suck it up! You've still got it better than the large majority of people world-wide. Count your blessings instead of your troubles and spend time with your families now that you have the opportunity. Go fishing, or walking, or gardening. Read! Learn things! Explore subjects or points of view you've never done before. If you just gotta drink, do it at home.
It occurs to me just now that the above rant might be entirely wasted. The readers of my blog are all intellectually superior, disinclined to lapses in logic and courteous concerning the welfare of others.
I finished Koontz's Brother Odd. It is definitely worth reading, and he always has a surprise or two, but I find that the final solution to the problem, the ultimate take-down of the bad guy, is sort of anti-climactic. In From the Corner of His Eye, this was also the case. The final fate of the insane serial killer is accomplished by a mere gesture of a child. In Brother Odd, the mad scientist is...well, never mind. I don't want to spoil it in case you want to read it, which I do recommend.
The climax in Odd Thomas was much better—more action, a longer passage of time, more tension. That was a great climax and even a surprise in the after-climax wrap-up.
As for my writing: It didn't take DAW anywhere near three months to decline Saving Atlantis. Shucks.
As a writer, I'm used to rejection. Actually I got used to it even earlier, in college, about every time I asked a girl out for a date.
TOR and Flame Tree Publishing are next to receive my effort.
I've finished (for this initial draft, anyway) the scene I was working on for World to World. Now onward and upward. One thing I did do in that scene was set a forerunner for a situation I anticipate in Book 2 (No title for that one yet).
That's it for today. I need to go into the basement and begin phase 1 of the war on the spiders: wiping out the webs. After that, phase two will be spraying the area with a mixture of water, dish soap, and peppermint oil.
Thanks you for reading, and please read something else. Page and Spine is starting two new tabs this Friday: one called "The Itch," which will be an "unleashing" of Lee Allen Hill, one of the best short story authors writing today. The other will be a tab dedicated to science fiction and fantasy that takes the place of The Reading Lamp. Check them out!
Almost forgot! My horror story, "Switch," will appear in Black Veins Anthology, a digital collection from The Great Void Books. Scheduled to be released May 15.

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Corona Post part 2

4/12/2020

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Happy Easter.
I've been approaching a certain anticipated scene in World to World (The first novel in my Lying Swords fantasy serial) and I finally have it done—just today in fact. There is one little part left. It is in fact a simple brief exchange of dialog, but I have to move the scene from the middle to the end. Won't take much, but I decided to take a break from that to write this. Since I'm going to five ten-hour days of work again, I don't know when I'll have a chance to get back to this.
DAW is one of the premier publishers of science fiction and fantasy. The only premier publisher of that genre that does not require agented submissions. So that's my first submission for Saving Atlantis. The drawback is that they want it exclusive for three months. So, I'll take that bet. What have I got to lose?
We've been observing the six feet of separation rule at work pretty well, but starting this week the gentleman that does the same job on the other shift and I will be there at the same time three days of the week. Our work stations are next to each other on a long table. The six feet apart policy can't be observed as it stands. Don't know what, if anything, the bosses will do, but I suspect one of us will be sent off to a different function much of the time. As long as it's equitable, fine with me. I had calculated that I could afford to go part-time in August and thus avoid these fifty-hour weeks. Well, shucks, they got me anyway. But I suppose I can survive. So far our geographic area is relatively low in the numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases and we all hope it will stay that way.
I finished reading Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz. I recommend it. I donated it to the PDC public library.
Here's an odd coincidence: When at the Goodwill store in LaCrosse I bought three Dean Koontz hardbacks without even looking at the titles. And I set them on my dresser, again without looking at the titles and picked up the top one, which was From the Corner of His Eye. Then I picked up the second, which was Odd Thomas. And now I'm starting the third, which is Brother Odd. The odd coincidence (pun intended) is that Brother Odd is the immediate sequel to Odd Thomas. Just by chance that I will read them in the order written.
Brother Odd seems much larger than its prequel, but maybe its print is larger and the pages thicker. And since one is now in the library, I can't check.
I suppose, like me, you are looking forward to the stimulus checks coming from the federal government. I thought I might spend mine on booze and broads, but my wife did not find that proposal amusing. I had alternative ideas: Guns and girls? Sweets and sex? All received negative judgments. Can't understand why.
I'm guessing we'll blow it on something frivolous, like bills.
We could buy a used SUV...ten percent of one, anyway.
Please stay safe, observe all social rules, and if you're stuck at home, read. All my novels are available electronically, hint, hint, hint.
Thank you.

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In the Time of the Corona

3/21/2020

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Got enough toilet paper? Enough cleaning product and alcohol wipes? Enough ammo? Yep, ammo. Ammunition is selling like people are expecting to repel rioters and looters. And maybe they are. Or else they want to protect their hoard of t.p.
Speaking of hoarding t.p., here's an editorial cartoon that might provide a chuckle: https://www.gocomics.com/chipbok/2020/03/20
I have a real hope—though not an expectation—that the precautions most of the country is taking, along with the research on either a vaccine or a cure—will actually get this damn virus pretty much non-disruptive by the end of May. Please, all of you stay safe, stay healthy, follow the guidelines, and be kind to each other.
On the writing front, I've finished the new ending of Saving Atlantis. I'm going against accepted form just a little; I have two epilogs. We'll see if that proves acceptable.
I'm now going over it one final time, reading it and applying a few tweaks. Perhaps I'll add or subtract a word here or a whole sentence there, but that's about it. Then I'll begin submitting.
On the reading front, I finished From the Corner of His Eye. I still think he over-wrote, but I must give him credit—he can really build tension. And after he brought everyone together, I would have to say that most of the characters were necessary, though if three or four had never been included and the story written accordingly it would not have been a weaker story. And a few deaths of good innocent people might have been avoided. And the final disposal of the bad guy was a surprise and while not anti-climactic it did seem to be over too quickly, but that's just my subjective view.
The story has a major theme, which is that every action or even every decision a person makes can have effects on people and places they never imagined. Everything is connected.
But he brings in a second minor theme: quantum mechanics. This involves some of the gifts the children in the story have, but it's obvious he was influenced by the research while writing this. Quantum mechanics tells us, among other things, that effect might happen before cause, or there may not be a cause, and that on the sub-atomic level two separate things, miles apart, can actually be two parts of the same thing and what happens to one happens to both simultaneously.
Sorry, I read the article years ago and only read it once, so I don't recall it all as accurately as I'd like.
As part of this speculation, he spends a little time on the theory that every major decision a person makes creates a different world, where, from that point on they made the opposite decision. As you can see, this provides for a real infinity of worlds, yet most (all?) of us are in just the one, and cannot access any of the billions or trillions of others.
Maybe that accounts for all the "empty" space in the universe. It isn't really empty, it's needed to accommodate all the other realities. That's my own spur-of-the-moment idea, by the way.
I did donate the book to the library. The public library is closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 concerns, but I dropped the book in the book return slot.
I've now started on another Koontz book, Odd Thomas. I'll keep you posted. This one is much shorter.
I haven't mentioned these in a while, so I think I should again. Three sources of free reading are Page and Spine, Daily Science Fiction, and Trouble Among the Stars. P&S publishes a new issue every Friday, with short stories, poetry, essays on writing, and a running serial titled Coffee House Chatter. Plus, their archives hold most of the writing I've published with them.
Daily Science Fiction can be sent to your email M-F, free. The stories are as often fantasy as science fiction, but they're usually pretty good. Unfortunately they've declined the four or five submissions I've sent them. But I'll keep trying.
Trouble Among the Stars, sadly, is closing after six issues. The deadline for submissions for the final issue is April 6, 2020. My story, "Guidelines," appears in Issue #2.
And that is it for this post. Thank you again for reading, and please continue to read whatever you can. And stay well.

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Working Two at Once

2/27/2020

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My apologies for the long wait for this. I've been very involved in the fiction writing, when the time allows. I worked on Lying Swords and made some good progress. Ideas continue to pop up. At the same time I was constantly considering the changes needed for Saving Atlantis. And I finally got it. I understood what I needed to do to add to Atlantis herself and the expanded explanations of the motives of the villains. I also needed to divide a scene into two parts, with a change of scene inserted between to increase tension.
I was involved with a significant sub-story in Lying Swords when this revelation for Saving Atlantis come to me. I quit the one and went to the other and that's what I've been up to on the writing front for the last two weeks. I still have one small plot hole to fill in—it will only take a brief bit of dialog. The problem is where exactly to put that dialog? One of the things important in writing is the flow of the narrative. It must proceed smoothly, unless the author is intentionally going for a jarring and disjointed style. Which is as legitimate as any other, but not for this kind of story. So, that bit of dialog must be in the right place. And, I have to rewrite the ending, since what I had before was a good happy-ever-after Romance ending.
In the meantime, while working on the paranormal thriller, I continue to get ideas and solutions for the fantasy series. This is one of the reasons a writer should have more than one work in progress (WIP) going on at a time. If stuck on one the author can go to the other, and often ideas for the one can come while working on the other.
I also have a short story I'd like to write but that one is really on the back burner for now.
I mentioned last time that I'd picked up another Dean Koontz novel. This one is titled From the Corner of His Eye. I don't find it nearly as compelling as Life Expectancy for a couple of reasons.
For one, I think he's trying to do too much. I'm a little over half done and he's introduced enough characters and enough conflicts to make two stories. And so far some of the characters seem to be unnecessary, but they may show up again later so I'll have to wait and see if that "criticism" is valid.
Another reason is that he is really over-writing in this one.
Example: "The hospital was drowned in the bottomless silence that fills places of human habitation only in the few hours before dawn, when the needs and hungers and fears of one day are forgotten and those of the next are not yet acknowledged, when our flailing species briefly floats insensate between one desperate swim and another."
He has stuff like that throughout the book. As literary prose, it's beautiful. But as a part of this semi-horror, semi-mystical story I find it distracting and patience-wearing.
On the good side, Koontz has presented us with a character that is as hateful a psychopath as any, yet his appearance is not at all repulsive, his inhumanity is tempered with physical human weaknesses, and Koontz never tells us, as the narrator, that the character is a psychopath. He shows us, over and over again in his thoughts as well as his actions.
Koontz has also developed an interesting and new (to me, anyway) metaphysical condition in one of the important characters, a little boy named Bartholomew. "Barty" seems able to be in more than one place at a time, somehow, but exactly how is not yet clear.
Example: Agnes, Barty's mother, and Barty have gone to the cemetery to put flowers on her husband's/his father's grave. It began raining hard. When she and Barty got into the car, "She was sopping, shivering. Water streamed from her soaked hair, down her face, as she wiped her beaded eyelashes with one dripping hand." Then, a few paragraphs describing her turning on the heat for herself and her son, and emphasizing her soaked condition, Barty tells her that she needs the heat, not him..."Agnes saw that Barty was dry. Not a single jewel of rain glimmered in his thick dark hair...His shirt and sweater were as dry as if they had just been taken off a hanger and from a dresser drawer....'I ran where the rain wasn't,' he said."
When I finish this book I'll donate it to the Prairie du Chien public library, so if any of you in the vicinity are intrigued enough to want to read it, it will be available there...if that does you any good.
In connection with that, I urge everyone that reads to donate your books to your local library if you have no particular desire to keep them. By all means, build and maintain your personal library. Mine has expanded beyond the dimensions of my bookcase, and my wife's collection of cookbooks has likewise done the same to hers. But chances are that you'll acquire some books that you like (or don't) and have no interest in keeping. Of course you can donate them to Goodwill or The Salvation Army, or the DAV store, or you can donate them to your local library.
I sincerely hope I don't go this long until my next entry. Please feel free to put any questions or comments in the comments section of this site or the comments section of just this blog, or on one of my two Facebook pages: the regular one or the author's page. And don't hesitate to remind me to post another if you think it's been too long. Thank you for your attention.
And by all means, read!

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Not Yet Post-Corona View

A Corona Rant

Corona Post part 2

In the Time of the Corona

Working Two at Once

Author

I'm a former teacher and current warehouse grunt that loves writing.

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Not Yet Post-Corona View

A Corona Rant

Corona Post part 2

In the Time of the Corona

Working Two at Once

AuthorI'm a former teacher and current warehouse grunt that loves writing.

Archive

Categories

Author

I'm a former teacher and current warehouse grunt that loves writing.