On my morning walk I did a little Marie Kondo-ing of the creative carhole in my brain, and decided to shutter Grinders (maybe not completely close it down, but place it on the back-burner). I think I’m trying to make it too realistic? I keep running into the following dramatic pickle —
What should the protag do? (I ask myself.) What would a real person do? (I respond.) Contact their attorney. (I conclude.)
And so I have waaayyyy too many pages of conversations with attorneys. Not particularly exciting. Due to this dullness I’ve found myself only writing on it once a week or so. I’m sure I’ll keep pecking away at it, but it’s getting de-prioritized in my writing queue. It’s always frustrating to be in a position where a project might not be completed (especially with the sunk costs!), but all this writing stuff is supposed to be fun and engaging, not boring and a chore.
Which means I’m moving on to the weird west piece that’s been languishing. Arriving at this conclusion put a spring in my step. I’ve been doing more timed writings this year as creative writing exercises, and I think I’ll be able to focus some of these on aspects of the weird west story (tentatively titled, “Three Chickens, Texas”).
I’ve also decided on the next 1HRRead. I’m going to write a long essay/short book about luck. Researching these is always fun. I look forward to learning more about probability and more about the power of talismans.
I finished reading The Ministry for the Future this weekend and decided to annotate it. There’s lots of terms/ideas/concepts I want to incorporate into the next edition of the Green New Deal 1HRRead. I’m going to post these annotations here.
It took five weeks into the new year to feel excited about any new writing projects, but it feels like these projects might have traction.
My resolution for 2021 is to continue reducing my screen time/time on the internet.
Before Covid I’d already carved out the first hour of every day to be free of screens. M/W/F I walk through the neighborhood first thing in the morning, and that eats up more than an hour.
The other days I’ll read some fiction, or water the garden; maybe do a few chores until at least one hour passes.
This is partially to stop being beholden to the internet every waking moment, and partially to give my eyes a fucking break. They’re getting older and need more care.
A little over a month ago I started timing my screen time while at work. I use an online timer and set it to go off every 20 or 25 minutes (depending on how much work I have to do that day). This reminds me to look away from the screen for a few minutes.
In 2021 I intend to stop using my computer (and internet) after 7pm. 7pm is a more-or-less randomly selected, to allow time if there’s anything I want to accomplish after the work day. I think most days my internet use will stop around 5:30 or 6.
I have a vague memory of being more creatively productive back in the analog-era. My hope is that without the internet to distract me in the evening I’ll spend more time doodling cartoons and making notes in my notebook. I hope some of those notes will translate into some flash fiction as the year progresses.
And, of course, there are the evergreens — not really resolutions because they are the constant aspirations in my life — get more exercise, eat better, be a kinder person, be less judgy, love more, write more, read more, listen better, give more, be better about helping those in my community, tend my garden, and keep that heart chakra open.
Here’s to 2021 being much, much better than 2020. Cheers!
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I’ll never understand why migas are not on every diner breakfast menu in the world, and why we don’t have a truck on every corner selling breakfast tacos.
Let me see if I understand this – there is a non-trivial core of conservatives in the US who believe by simply stating that black lives matter, or that you oppose fascism, you are a terrorist threat to the US. And, the best way to deal with this existential threat to American freedom and liberty is to declare martial law, suspend the constitution, and have the US military oversee a brand new, national election.
And the majority of conservative leaders keep their mouth shut, neither condemning nor supporting.
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I’ve noticed a few times now that presumptive Biden nominees are the ‘czar’ of something in new headlines. It feels like no Trump nominees were ever the ‘czar’ of anything, but Obama nominees were. Can that be right? If so, what is up with that?
“So, people bail on diets. Not just because they’re harder than they expected, but because they’re so much harder it seems unfair, almost criminally unjust. You can’t shake the bitter thought that, “This amount of effort should result in me looking like a panty model.”
“It applies to everything. America is full of frustrated, broken, baffled people because so many of us think, ‘If I work this hard, this many hours a week, I should have (a great job, a nice house, a nice car, etc). I don’t have that thing, therefore something has corrupted the system and kept me from getting what I deserve, and that something must be (the government, illegal immigrants, my wife, my boss, my bad luck, etc).‘”
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“The Centre for Applied Eschatology is a transdisciplinary research center dedicated to ending the world. We connect professionals from the public sector, private industry, and academia to develop new knowledge and apply existing research to curtail the world’s long-term future.”
I decided I needed something to remind me to take a break from looking at the screen during the workday. After years and years of screen-staring, I want to give my poor eyes a break.
I started using Tomato-Timer, an easy-to-use web app that will countdown and give me a audible alert when a certain amount of time has passed.
You can adjust the time and it has a few sound options to choose from. It’s web-based so there’s nothing to download. I run it in a tab while I do my work.
It’s meant for those using the Pomodoro technique for productivity. I’m not much for productivity hacks, but I must admit that chunking my work seems to be paying off. Since I’ve started I don’t feel as tired at the end of the day, and my eyes don’t feel as strained.
I still read quite a bit, but as a child and young teen I’d read for hours and hours, and for days and days. Reading for fun. (I read hour after hour in grad school as well, but that was a different kind of fun. In grad school I read to engage, as a child I read to escape.)
In my early teens I read buckets and barrels of sword & sorcery, and high fantasy, but at some point that kind of vaguely medieval, vaguely western Europe sort of novel (or, more typically, trilogy of novels) lost my favor. I probably haven’t read a half-dozen fantasies like that in the last forty years.
However, driven by my mind’s inability to engage with anything critically, I’ve been fishing around for escapist literature. For reasons I can’t fully recall, I picked up Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice, and I’ve been reading compulsively ever since.
This compulsive desire reminds me of youthful Saturdays when I’d lay on the couch all afternoon, with nothing more substantial planned than maybe snacks between chapters.
As of this writing I’m about a third of the way through the third volume of the first Farseer trilogy. I’d give even odds I’ll continue with more Hobb once this trilogy is done.
To call it escapist literature is not meant to be a slight against Hobb. She’s great! My mind is flooded with the detail of her world, and moved by the danger and desires of her characters, to the exclusion of the world around me. I can sink into the world Hobb creates, and for a brief window of time I don’t think about politics, or human cruelty. Fear of contagion and sickness is banished from my thoughts. The future is neither grim nor uncertain, because it is tightly bound in what happens over the next few pages, and I know that with a little patience that future will be revealed.
Once this Hobb phase has ended, and I have the cognitive energy to engage a bit more critically (assuming that day ever comes), I have The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson sitting at the top of my TBR pile.
I was puzzling over this a few months ago. What was the deal with Rod McKuen? For a minute, in the late sixties and early seventies, he was the most popular poet in the US.
When I started working in a local bookstore (local to me, in Texas) in the mid-eighties, there were still dozens of McKuen poetry books in print, and we carried them all.
They were, and remain, horrible.
A few months ago I wondered if I simply didn’t have the perspective to understand the hidden beauty of Rod McKuen. Perhaps there was some charm the callow teenage me couldn’t appreciate.
Nope. Pure dreck. Bad. Like…really, really bad.
The reason I’d gone back to reconsider McKuen is because I learned he’d translated the songs of Jacques Brel. If you know the english version of the song “If You Go Away,” or “Seasons in the Sun,” you know a Brel song translated by Rod McKuen. (While he often kept Brel’s references to taboo topics, he sanitized “Seasons in the Sun” for an American audience.)
I didn’t realize until this year that the guy writing that abyssmal poety was the same person that helped introduce Brel to an American audience. Not only that, but before his arrival in the upper echelon of fame and fortune, he did readings with Ginsberg, and Kerouac, and performed at the Purple Onion. Later, Sinatra would commission McKuen to write a whole album. (Which just goes to show that drugs and alcohol can have a profoundly negative affect on your taste levels.)
It’s worth reading just for the choice quotes he finds from those unimpressed by McKuen’s talent.
McKuen’s books, he wrote, belonged in “the lachrymose quagmire of the KMart poetry section.”
“language is not his strong point”
I thought about dropping in a McKuen video, but saw this live performance of “Jackie” by Scott Walker and decided to end with it, instead. This is Brel translated into English, but not the McKuen translation.
Scott Walker singing a Jacques Brel song, but this one is translated by Mort Shuman
Jackie
And if one day I should become A singer with a Spanish bum Who sings for women of great virtue I’d sing to them with a guitar I borrowed from a coffee bar Well, what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you My name would be Antonio And all my bridges I would burn And when I gave them some they’d know I’d expect something in return I’d have to get drunk every night And talk about virility With some old grandmama Who might be decked out like a christmas tree And though pink elephants I’d see Though I’d be drunk as I could be Still I would sing my song to me About the time they called me “Jacky”
If I could be for only an hour If I could be for an hour every day If I could be for just one little hour Cute, cute in a stupid ass way
And if I joined the social whirl Became procurer of young girls Then I would have my own bordellos My record would be number one And I’d sell records by the ton All sung by many other fellows My name would then be handsome Jack And I’d sell boats of opium Whisky that came from Twickenham Authentic queers And phony virgins If I had banks on every finger A finger in every country And all the countries ruled by me I’d still know where I’d want to be Locked up inside my opium den Surrounded by some China men I’d sing the song that I sang then About the time they called me “Jacky”
If I could be for only an hour If I could be for an hour every day If I could be for just one little hour Cute, cute in a stupid ass way
Now, tell me, wouldn’t it be nice That if one day in paradise I’d sing for all the ladies up there And they would sing along with me We’d be so happy there to be Cos’ down below is really nowhere And if my name were Juniper Then I would know where I was going And then I would become all knowing My beard so very long and flowing If I became deaf, dumb, and blind Because I pitied all mankind And broke my heart to make things right I’d know that every single night When my angelic work was through The angels and the Devil too Would sing my childhood song to me About the time they called me “Jacky”
If I could be for only an hour If I could be for an hour every day If I could be for just one little hour Cute, cute in a stupid ass way
When I read the word ‘girl’ I take it to mean ‘female child’. Which occasionally makes whatever I’m reading deeply unsettling, until I snap that the writer means ‘adult woman’.
I know that ‘descriptively’ girl is often meant to mean adult woman, but my ‘prescriptive’ brain always finds it jarring.
Goldfish Generation – a way of referring to the group of people who have grown up with smartphones and other technology and have a poor memory and attention span as a result.
“Sheree Renée Thomas is the award-winning writer and editor of Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000) and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004), which earned the 2001 and 2005 World Fantasy Awards for Year’s Best Anthology. She has also edited for Random House and for magazines like Apex, Obsidian, and Strange Horizons. She is a member of SFWA, HWA, SFPA, and Cave Canem. Thomas is an author and poet with three collections, Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (Third Man Books, 2020), Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (Aqueduct Press, 2016) and Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems (Aqueduct Press, 2011). Widely anthologized, her work also appears in The Big Book of Modern Fantasy and The New York Times. She was honored as a 2020 World Fantasy Award Finalist for her contributions to the genre. Thomas will be the tenth editor in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction‘s storied history. Her first appearance on the masthead will be in the March/April 2021 issue.”
In an earlier post I mentioned that I missed the little progress widgets NaNoWriMo used to have. It just occurred to me that WP probably has similar widgets. Sure enough, there’s a variety to choose from.
So, even though I’m not doing NaNoWriMo this year, I’ve started writing the novel I’ve been plotting for the last four or five months. And now, I’ve got a little progress bar on the blog so I can show off how much, or how little, I’m getting done.
My (probably) overly-ambitious goal is to have this draft completed by the end of the year. More realisticially, it will be January or February, and then the edits will start.
In 2013 I decided I needed a fictional city. Many of my stories take place in Tampa (or somewhere in Florida) just because I know the layout. I know how long it takes to get to the beach, what the patrol cars look like, how diverse the population is, and other little details that sometimes pop up in a story.
But for the urban fantasy story I was working on I wanted a fake town.
“Aha! Why not a fake universe?” I thought. “I should have my own universe where I can set multiple stories.”
And so, Abdera, Florida was born.
Among the classical Greeks, Abdera was the de facto city of nitwits. A shorthand for a comedic character was to say they were an Abderite. You might signal a joke by starting “In Abdera….” A current analog would be ‘hillbilly’ or (growing up in Texas), an ‘aggie’. (Ironically, Abdera was the real home of Democritus, “the laughing philosopher.”)
Abdera, Florida struck me as the perfect name for a city meant to be a little off-kilter, and full of ridiculous people.
Since then I’ve set four or five stories in Abdera, and at least one NaNoWriMo project.
A few days ago I realized that several stories I set in other locations could easily be moved to Abdera. Maybe I might even have enough for an entire collection!
I don’t. Not even close.
But in investigating this I re-read many of the stories I wrote in 2017 (the story-a-month year), and it turns out I enjoyed reading them. I can see from this distance how to make them better, and there are parts that hold up.
As I read them I realized one of the things missing from my creative endeavors lately has been a sense of play. This pre-dates the pandemic, and goes back to the growing work burnout I experienced in 2018-2019.
My current creative project definitely isn’t playful (near-future techno-thriller!), but since I’m making progress, I’m going to keep plugging away. But I’ve also started going through the stories that take place in Abdera (and the stories that CAN take place in Abdera) and cataloging all the names and locations. Now that I have these characters, it’s probably time to have them start running into each other in new stories. It’s time to put all that work into a blender, hit the pulse button, and see what sort of absurd concoction I can pour out.
Non-profit organizations may take donated items, like t-shirts, and give them away (or sell them to wholesalers, who then mark up the price by 300-400 percent) in poor areas of the global south.
For example, at a championship sports games, shirts are printed for both sides to celebrate their championship win. One team loses, however, and those shirts are donated to a charity, mission, or non-profit organization.
Somewhere there is someone with a warehouse full of MAGA gear. If we move on to a new president in November, that means there will be a zillion hats and t-shirts with no US market. That apparel will likely/possibly end up in developing countries.
Which means that a half dozen years from now documentarians working in Liberia or rural Mali or Central African Republic will be shooting video of people wearing MAGA gear.
