Pondering my Novel

 As I am now 6,000-8,000 words away from finishing my novel, "2012/2021" I have begun noticing the themes that I wasn't necessarily consciously aware of until I'd been working on it for several months. My intent was always twofold: To write my own Vonnegut-type of novel and to write the novel I wish I'd written when I published "Dreamers at Infinity's Core." And all it took was a global pandemic, idiots who thought it was fake despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and unbelievable amounts of selfishness and self-entitlement.

Funnily enough, the COVID pandemic is only mentioned sparingly in the novel and never by name. I felt keeping it more abstract and ominous worked better as a plot device. Besides, the main protagonist is from the year 2012, so he really has no idea what's coming in 2020. This is a novel packed with ideas and images and connections that bridge time, space and reality itself. Making it about COVID would defeat the purpose and run the risk of becoming preachy. This is not a preachy book. It doesn't slow down long enough to preach.

It does, however, deal with themes that are sure to make some people uncomfortable. It also offers answers that many would resoundingly reject for fear of feeling as if their entire lives were pointless. Others will feel emboldened by the purposefulness they find in the narrative.

Without going too deeply into the story itself, here is a list of themes I have noticed as I close in on the novel's intentionally 

• Selfishness
• Greed
• Lack of Empathy
• Self-righteousness
• Corporate dominance
• The nature of creation
• Cult-like mentalities
• Doppelgangers
• Regret
• Redemption
• Helplessness
• Courage
• Dream logic
• The soul-crushing experience of retail work
• The inherent shallowness of thoughts and prayers
• Revolution
• The death of objective thought

And that's just off the top of my head! "2012/2021" isn't so much a story as an unraveling that feeds on itself like my own mind.

I can't wait to see it get rejected over and over!

Dispatches From the Coronavirus Days #12- Idiot Edition

There's a reason my home state of Michigan was home to the Militia movement of the Nineties and that reason has been hammered home repeatedly by the insanity and abject stupidity coming from the group of people who find a stay-at-home quarantine extention to be an attack on their liberties. And what are those liberties, exactly? I think I'll let the words of those opposed to the health and well-being of their fellow humans explain it to you:

On the Facebook page "Michiganders Against Excessive Quartine" someone posted an article from some bullshit site with a headline declaring that only Trump can reopen the country. Below that, some scholar commented," Please do so Sir. Our grezy Country was not met to be on lockdown like this. Time to Make America Great again. We can't do our part under house arrest."

House arrest. That's how these acolytes of Ayn Rand, half of whom probably never heard of her, consider quarantine in the midst of the worst global epidemic since 1918!

Another comment seemed to find the need to equate gay marriage with Covid 19. She wrote, "I remember when we voted as a state, "One Man, One Woman" marriage for our state, federal government under Obama changed it."

Clearly gays wanting equal rights is where this virus came from. The China thing is little more than a cover story for the Gay Mafia's Deepstate Illuminati 5G agenda.

Another person, agreeing that "libruls" need fear to govern (an ironic statement if ever there was one) commented, "Fear is really, really rambid right now and I believe that's all part of the plan!"

I don't know who "Rambid" is, but apparently he has a lot to answer for! Kinda sounds like a French villain in a James Bond movie.

But fear not. This "movement" has a ringleader and he is no disappointment. Looking for all the world like a sleazy used car salesman who moonlights as a Prosperity Gospel preacher, Garrett Soldano is single-handedly fanning the flames of idiocy. Soldano is a practicing chiropractor for whatever that's worth in this situation. I guess because he has "doctor" before his name, that makes him the go-to expert on pandemics for the anti-quarantine crowd. I know that next time one hits, my first stop will be a guy who works on the body's "meridians." However, if you remain unconvinced by his choice of medical practice, he also lists himself on Twitter as, ""AN ENTREPRENEUR, AUTHOR, PHILANTHROPIST, AND A MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER."

Sensing his time to shine, Soldano is over all the interwebs telling Michigan residents to "stand tall" against the Governor's attempts to halt the spread of the virus because the economy is more important than people not dying. He also does daily video updates on the aforementioned Facebook page lest anyone start thinking he's a smug, self-promoting opportunist who is seizing a moment for his own personal gain. And naturally, all the ill-informed, selfish residents of Michigan are flocking to this individual for guidance in uncertain times. I guess nothing screams "Constitutional Expert" like a guy who cracks backs and peddles holistic remedies. He won't mind my saying this because, in his own words, "...our fight for our Constitutional rights gets fanned HOTTER by every hate comment against us."

These people aren't limiting their protests to Facebook, however. They're planning a "march" of sorts on April 15th. But instead of standing outside, they plan to gridlock the state capitol in Lansing. So, they're protesting a quarantine by quarantining themselves. Feel free to reread that previous sentence as many times as you need.

So much of this insane rambling can be traced back to the Michigan Militia, a group of alarmist anti-gubmint types who basically shot off guns in the forest, wore fatigues and poisoned the minds of their fellow Michiganders. Now we're dealing with their inheritors.

We can only hope the people with sense still outnumber them.

Newest Patreon Post.

I once again turn introspective, except this time it's about my writing.

Become a patron for a dollar or more per month and read it here!

Shameless Self-Promotion and why I still avoid it.

Yesterday I was chided by a co-worker as we walked into one of the libraries I work for to start our day. She and I have worked together for at least two years  now if not longer and somehow she had never heard that I was a published author.

Keep in mind, this is a library. A place that could potentially carry my work and larger collections containing my contributions. Most of the people I work with know I'm a writer, although some of them may not know how much I've actually had published. Some of you are probably reading this in disbelief, thinking about how if you were a published author, everybody would know about it. I have no problem with that, it's just not how I have chosen to live my life.

I am by no means an extremist, however. I have a colleague from my old writing workshop days who doesn't tell co-workers anything about her secret identity as a published author. She prefers to keep the two parts of herself separate. I don't mind mixing them because, to my way of thinking, they aren't separate.

Being an author isn't a "side-hustle," that loathsome, ubiquitous expressions notwithstanding. It is the direct end result of being a writer. The author completes his or her work and sees it published and, gods willing, read by at least one dedicated, lonely individual out there living in a Unabomber-style shack, with apologies to The Simpsons. It is the final manifestation of all those undeniable creative urges we have felt since we can remember. The need to tell a story, to express one's self, cannot be reduced to a mere "hustle" to obtain extra cash. We'll leave that to dubious success stories such as the so-called "Food Babe and this guy.

So, when pressed to talk about my writing, a small part of me feels like a cheap huckster if I go too far, which I define as mentioning all the low, low prices my work can be purchased for if you just act now! 

What do I look like, one of those brazen self-publishing fanatics who fell for the algorithm-manipulating strategy of the mid-2000s?

I suspect my co-worker felt out of the loop more than anything else. When I told her I post on Facebook about my work all the time, she told me she only went on Facebook to read my bizarre, funny rants. I didn't have the heart to tell her she basically has seen my writing in that case.

However, in the interest of not alienating anyone who might be unaware of how or where to find the bulk of my published work, click this link.

Official Release.

The "Deadly Bargain: A Colors in Darkness Anthology" Kindle Edition is now live and ready for ordering. This one features my short story, "Your Future for a Low, Low Price," a tale I'm rather proud of.

Order it here.

Let's Hear it for Diversity (And paid publishing opportunities)!

Sometimes, when one has been writing long enough and has been fortunate enough to see publication of several pieces, there is the occasional feeling that a completed work is a slam dunk. Such was the case with my short story, "Your Future for a Low, Low Price" which was just accepted for publication in the Colors in Darkness anthology "Deadly Bargain" (pictured below).

My story deals with the provided character who first appears as a non-specified Eastern European handyman/peddler in a well-to-do suburban neighborhood who draws the ire of an immigrant-hating Amurican looking for someone on whom he can take out his lifelong frustrations. But when the peddler offers him the future, his rage gives way to something even worse. As soon as I fiished it, I knew it was likely to get picked up by someone.

I don't have a publication date yet but once I do, I'll post an update.

My Trump Satire is Now Available on Kindle!!!

When I wrote my Trump satire for an anthology looking for Trump satire, I knew I was writing something so specific that is the editors didn't want it, it was unlikely that I would find another group that did. So, I vowed to self-publish the story in that case and here it is for the bargain basement price of 99 cents!

This is the first Kindle publication I've done in about six years. Feel free to leave a review if you do decide to purchase it. As always, all reviews are welcome, whether positive, negative or indifferent. Not that I have the power to remove them anyway!

Click here for the feel-good experience of a lifetime! It's the best feel-good experience. You've never seen a better one, I can tell you. Everybody loves it. It's tremendous!

The Secret to Writing Donald Trump as a Short Story Subject.

It's really simple to write about Donald Trump in a fictional context because, ultimately, he is a living work of fiction. Nothing about him is genuine except his unerring propensity for absolute, unadulterated self-promoting horseshit. So really, he is the very essence of a caricature of a real person. The problem lies in knowing how to handle this knowledge. He's such an easy target that one could be accused of taking unfair advantage or going for the cheap shot with practically every sentence. He isn't a protagonist I would normally attempt in my writing except I happened to read about an anthology looking for parotic tales starring his royal orange majesty.

How did I figure out what to do? I decided to let the man speak for himself. Only a first person narrative could come close to capturing his word salad, nonsense diatribes. I also decided it was better to avoid turning Trump into a parody since he already is one. To try and take a ridiculous character like him and make him more ridiculous would be...well, you know.

So, it works better to let Trump be Trump and make the situation ludicrous or impossible. Directly quoting him is a good method as well, but it's also fun to write new dialogue that sounds enough like him to fool people into wondering whether or not he actually said it. I first cut my teeth on that one by using the Fake Trump Tweet app. Only the ones that insulted me as a writer were obvious to people.

The story is clipping right along and will probably be finished soon. Then the beta reader(s) get to read it and tell me how much it sucks so I can do a rewrite or two or twelve. Then I'll send it to the anthology and hope for the best. If it's rejected, I'm going to do something I don't normally do and self-publish it since it's far too specific to send elsewhere. That's why I rarely send to anthologies that want such particular submissions, but this was too much fun to pass up.

International Voices Finally Speaking in Science Fiction.

I'm not normally one to join in on the "essential reading" bandwagon and especially when it's work I haven't even read (This anthology doesn't come out for another five days) but in a field traditionally dominated by basically two types of authors, namely men and women of Western European descent, it's about damn time someone else got into the science fiction writing field.

Despite what those idiotic "Sad Puppies" choose to believe, there is a larger, more vital world beyond White Male Christendom-themed tales of human superiority in the realm of speculative fiction .

So, I can't wait for this one and despite the fact that I work for two libraries and could easily read it for free, I think I'll buy it instead.






If it's anywhere near as good as the Chinese science fiction anthology "Invisible Planets" I read earlier this year, I'll be most pleased. Talk about a refreshing, unique approach and execution. Every story was lyrical and compelling.

The Quote That Perfectly Explains my Disdain for Fandom.

 "There was once a false sense that fandom was the place where all of those things were celebrated: Diversity, the fight against bullies of all types, and the front line of those supporting progress and change. Apparently, that was a smokescreen that the Internet has effectively wiped away."

-David Wilson, Writer and Illustrator

A Prime Example of the Writer's Lament

If I wrote a story with a character who was:

a) Anti-gay and
b) Consorted with White Supremacists while
c) Voting in favor of allowing the mentally ill to own guns and
d) Reaping the benefits of free taxpayer-supplied healthcare

who was shot by a crazy man with a legal handgun, saved by an African American lesbian and able to go into the hospital without a worry about insurance coverage because the government is footing the bill, I would be accused of preaching or being a "social justice warrior."

Yet in real life something like this has actually taken place!

Fiction has to make more sense than reality for people to believe it's realistic!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"I am not a nice man. You want something heartwarming...buy a puppy."

-Greg Palast, Kickass Investigative Journalist and Thorn in the Side of the Koch Bros.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“You don’t tell anybody to shut up!You work for us!”

-A Constituent in Frost, Texas in response to Rep. Joe Barton (R)

Issac Marion's Fake Trump Tweet & The Death of Political Satire

Years ago during the opening credits of one of the Halloween specials "The Simpsons" does every year, one of the many gravestones with funny messages on them featured political satire as the dearly departed. As usual, the alien time travelers who write for that show foresaw the future in hilarious and frightening ways.

At the time, political satire was still viable, despite needing occasional trips to the doctor. However, the dominance of social media, something that should have been a force for increased knowledge and understanding of parody and satire, has actually aided in the swiftly encroaching loss of this most vital component of a supposedly free society. Instead, we're now moving towards an era where all attempts at irony become fodder for an increasingly easily offended population. And political affiliation is becoming meaningless, as the so-called "snowflake" mentality is just as prevalent among those on the Right as it is on the Left.

Recently, horror author Issac Marion who wrote the surprisingly engaging zombie romance satire "Warm Bodies" dared to post a humorous dialogue between himself and *urp* President Trump. I have also used the fake Trump Tweet app a few times. To my delight, nobody could tell if they were real or not in most cases. I never created a series of them like Marion because I knew some imbecile would screenshot it and, at some point, somebody would think they were real. It never occurred to me that a new breed of imbecile would find offense in the satire itself, but that's exactly what happened to him.

In a stunning display of contextual ignorance, angry people who thought the exchange was real and jumped to Marion's defense went on the offensive, reading him the riot act for daring to indulge a fiction writing exercise designed to make a point about a subject he finds repugnant. I'd mention the irony of the invective coming from members of the Left Wing, but since irony is a rapidly diminishing resource, I don't want to waste any of it by mentioning something so obvious.

Marion  breaks down his perceived "offenses" in list form, each point more ludicrous and asinine than the last. The most telling is Point #2, wherein he addresses an accusation of spreading the now ubiquitous and soon-to-be-meaningless concept of fake news. In his analysis, Marion writes:

I am a fiction writer. I wrote a fictional dialogue and posted it on my personal Twitter account, without any surrounding context to suggest that this was a real occurrence rather than just another bit of nonsense theater squirting out of my brain. If anyone thought it really mattered, a quick click to my profile—or Trump’s—would have revealed the truth. But no one bothered to do that because IT DIDN'T MATTER.

That's right, it didn't. People are so primed for and even seduced by the very notion of outrage now that fact-checking is regarded as quaint and wasteful. Not to toot my own horn, but my first instinct was to question the veracity of the reposting. It seemed too good to be true. Trump had finally crossed the line from journalism antagonist to displaying a woeful ignorance of the fiction writing process. And he'd chosen a lesser known writer to attack! Within moments, I'd discovered the truth and guess what? I was okay with it!

Granted, I'm a fiction writer as well and, while my renown is significantly lower even than Marion's self-described low number of followers, I am at least acquainted with the creative process. I don't expect everyone else to be, elitist as that may sound to those who aren't, but satire and parody are protected by the First Amendment! That means it's something all thinking Americans and indeed humans should know about.  There is no excuse for being so wrapped up in one's personal cause that harmless and entertaining humor becomes viewed as worthy of ridicule and scorn.

We are now entering a very dangerous era and it all started when the drawings of schoolchildren containing vaguely violent imagery became calls to the police and mandatory psychiatric sessions. Think of all the people of previous generations--people like me--whose writing and drawing could have ruined their lives in such a free thought hostile environment. Now the same preposterous censorship of the darker aspects of our minds are being scrutinized in authors by over-sensitive adults with too much time on their hands. These same people actually feel the need to write "sarcasm" after their barely sarcastic comments and insist that others do the same to avoid potential offense.

Isaac Marion created a satirical piece, mostly for his own amusement. Leave him the hell alone and get over yourselves.

A Timely Sentiment.

Two for Thanksgiving.

The only other time I ever wrote about Thanksgiving on this blog took the form of a history lesson/rant about the absolute bullshittery involved in such a dubious holiday. I was called crazy for writing it so I knew I’d done the right thing. I never revisited the topic because, honestly, what’s left to say that hasn’t been expounded on by others far more knowledgeable than I?

So, this post is not a history lesson but it is most certainly a rant.  A personal one.

In the wake of my mother-in-law’s passing, several things came to light and to pass. But she didn’t need to physically pass away to make that happen. Even before she was gone, months before, when she was no longer aware that it was a holiday,  my wife's siblings realized they no longer needed to avoid her scrutiny if they didn’t include my wife and, by extension, me in holiday gatherings.

Obviously if they could no longer get in trouble, they also no longer had to conform to the old ways of doing things. And while the irony of peoplre who refer to themselves as "The Family" and claim to embrace all forms of traditionalism comprising their supposed core values in the name of convenience and comfort isn’t lost on me, this post isn’t about pointing out hypocrisy. I could spend volumes on that. No, this post is about the simplest of concepts: Right and Wrong.

Who am I to discuss these things as if I’m an expert, they would probably say? My response is as simple as the concept: I’m a human being who knows better than to try and fool myself and others into thinking blatant disregard can be disguised as righteouness.

My wife devoted countless days and nights to her mother’s well-being only to be shut out towards the end for reasons I’ll not expound on here. Suffice it to say, the very least that could be done in honor of their mother and what went before is to extend an invitation to a holiday get-together. Who cares if she says no? If you don’t care enough to even present the appearance of propriety and compassion, you sure as hell shouldn’t care if someone declines an invitation. If anything, you’d get to spin it into a smug assurance of your own moral superiority.

So, perhaps the fear is that the invitation would be accepted and they would have to face their own shortcomings and wrongdoing. It is, after all, easier to remain in one’s bubble than to pop it and risk inhaling less familiar air.

That must be why they couldn’t even wait until their mother was completely gone before beginning the now annual act of choosing not to include my wife in the holidays.

You may notice that I haven’t really included myself in the non-inviting discussion. That’s because I have no stake in this. For my money, I could literally go the rest of my life and never partake in another holiday gathering with them and be perfectly fine. But she is their sister and aunt and they should at least have the good taste to go through the motions. One would think the nieces and nephews she helped raise who are now adults and had nothing to do with the falling out would acknowledge her on holidays, especially since she had made sure to send them birthday wishes. They did not return the favor on her birthday.

This year’s Thanksgiving will be almost like last year’s, with just the two of us feasting on an incredible meal (she prepared her mom's traditional meal to honor her)  my wife has prepared all by herself. Except last year we took food to her mom and spent the evening with her. No one else did that.

 I imagine at some point my wife might be hard-pressed to even do that as the years go on, and who could blame her? Pettiness has a way of gnawing at our souls until there’s precious little left. Still, sometimes I wonder if there really are only two of us. There have been signs and moments that indicate my wife is not alone.

I look forward to what she prepares and am thankful she is in my life and still willing to go through so much to make the day memorable and worthwhile, mostly in honor or her mother’s memory.

Ultimately, it is as my own mother used to say: We can’t control how others act, but we have almost total control over how we react.

Happy Thanksgiving~

My Literary Hero James Morrow's Thoughts on the Trump Victory.

"Beneath the disgusting and endlessly distracting masks of Donald Trump—misogynist, racist, xenophobe, religious bigot—lies the matrix of a face unprecedented among those forty-four men who’ve held our country’s highest office: the face not of a mere sociopath (the republic was hardly spared that in the past) but rather of a sociopath who can’t be bothered to disguise his lack of a conscience, knowing that a corrupt legislature will do that for him. And so we leap into a void ...not foreseen by the 18th-century Enlightenment rationalists who assembled our republic: a zone of raw nihilism and provisional absurdity, reverberant with the dark laughter of a nonexistent Providence, where ignorant armies clash by night and tell lies by day, waiting for Godot. Were the stakes not so large, and the impending piles of bodies not so high, my own inner sociopath would anticipate the next four years with sheer, salivating, hideous pleasure."

Just Call me A Worthy Source for Citation.

This insightful article used one of my Movie Network articles as a reference.

Work-related rant. Scroll down or endure. Your choice:

Working at Library1, the smaller of the two libraries, where donations of books are accepted but there's only a small, dedicated group of seniors who go through them. In comes a guy who asks me where the donations should be brought. I ask him if it's a large amount and he advises me there are ten boxes. That's not exactly a shitload, especially if you're used  to Library2, so I grab a cart and go outside to help him since the security guy who'd normally do it isn't in today.

 Once outside and next to the van, I meet the guy's wife, who advises me in a cavalier manner that her mom just died. I express my condolences and she says, "Yeah, it's a bummer. So, she was an avid reader and we're trying to get rid of all her old books.” She laughs.

 Laughs.

 

So, eight boxes later I’m unloading the cart, thinking there could only be a few boxes left. As I emerge from the back with a now empty cart, I see that she has grabbed a librarian to help her find me because apparently I took too long to unload the cart into the tiny space allowed.  She then asks if we have more than one cart which, because I am already overheated and annoyed, doesn't immediately send up a red flag.

 Back outside, it slowly dawns me on that the cart is filling up again and they do indeed have a shitload of boxes left in their van. We are now at fifteen boxes and no end in sight. At this point, picturing the facial expression of my co-worker who also heads up the all-volunteer Friends of the Library group, I tell her this second round is as much as we can take.

 Is the woman gracious and grateful that we took half of her enormous payload? Have you been to America? If so, don’t ask silly questions.




 

 The woman flies into a hysterical fit, giving me her life story and telling me how she has to drive X amount of people to some-place and yadda-yadda and how the bookstore she tried directed her to a dumpster and the other nearby library wasn’t accepting donations, etc. But for some reason, because we accepted a large amount, we were supposed to accommodate an entire van full of boxed books.

 Try as I might to not let this set the tone for my day, it was within the first thirty minutes and that makes it nearly impossible.

I would say it's a real bummer, but apparently that word is reserved for serious inconveniences like the deaths of our parents.

 

Rant ended.