Jason Arnett's Blog

They sit across from each other, coffees half gone, when it comes up.

There’s a difference between training and experience, one says, and that’s what makes art. Art is what you respond to, the human factor. The other agrees that’s indeed the case but, they say, the training will get better and so will the art.

The first one sighs, you’re missing the point. It’s the human experience that informs creativity. No one can write a story like I do. No robot is capable of what I am. But it can emulate what you do, they say. Not the same thing, the first argues, not in a million years. 

But people will buy it, the second asserts. The general public doesn’t care about art or where it comes from. They want to be entertained.

The silence between them stretches. Yeah, the first replies, that’s part of the problem, too.

Hi, I’m Jason and I write stories you might find to your taste. Thank you so much for stopping by. 

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Day At the Dog Races

The revision of the seventh draft of Masque is nearing the finish line. I love this book as much now as when I started writing it over two years ago. I’ve said this a lot but it’s some of my favorite of my writing. It feels like a level up. No matter what anyone thinks of it after I release it into the wild, I’m the happiest I’ve been at this stage of the book. I mean, look:

I really don’t do much social media beyond updating progress with GIFs that amuse me.

Masque, second of All the Devils, is coming soon. I promise.

Butterfly Caught

When I was a baby writer, I absorbed all the “rules” writers I admired offered. Some were published in magazines and reformatted for the Internet, others were sought for content on the Internet. They were easily accessible and widely shared. Authors who blogged regularly offered their rules and there were lots of discussions among writers on the Internet about those rules. Write what you know was always a hot topic. So was show don’t tell and the debate around dialogue tags was endless. Really, endless.

Maybe it still is. Maybe I just don’t hang out in those parts of the Internet any more because I’m busy with life and my own writing. I took in all that advice, processed it for myself and applied what made sense to me. A lot of it still rattles around in the back of my brain but of all the things I follow as ‘rules’ it boils down to this: 

Read outside my genre, read outside my comfort zone, read widely, and write.

And that’s what works for me. I try to write every day because any words gained means I have more than I did the day before. I can’t apply a lot of what full-time writers say are best practices because I’m not a full-time writer, but I adapt what I can to my process. 

So that’s my advice: take in all you can from others, process it for yourself, then use what makes sense. Adapt and evolve over time.

Raise Love

One of my favorite, perhaps essential, tools in my writing is Scrivener. I bought in when it was offered at a discount for ‘winning’ NaNoWriMo* many, many years ago and have used it ever since. It is SO robust that I’m constantly discovering new ways to use it. The word count feature is fun, and setting a session target has helped me when I felt like I needed to work more consistently. The name generator is a terrific source of inspiration. I create a new project for every draft and number them so I can keep track. This makes is easy to copy a scene from one draft into a new one and to consult notes I made across all the drafts.

But with Masque, I’ve been using the cork board feature more, and keeping much better notes in each scene. Adding chapter summaries in the Synopsis as I’m writing or viewing them as a whole helps me discover issues with the plot and fix them definitively then spread the fix by noting it in the other summaries. It hasn’t sped up my process, for sure, but it does help. 

Source: https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/use-scrivener-to-edit/ / K.M. Weiland

I’m revising in Scrivener, too, and that feature is terribly helpful. With a click I’m in revision mode and everything I type is in that revision color. When I go through next, I’ll switch to the next revision level and work in a different color. There will be places where there may eventually be three or four colors on a page so I’ll be able to see what changes I made in the last pass. 

This isn’t all the program is capable of, nor is it all I use inside it. Of course, your mileage will vary if you decide to dive in, so – you know – what are you waiting for?

If you want to know more about how Scrivener can be used effectively, once you’re ready to use it, I highly recommend starting with How To Use Scrivener to Edit Your Novels by KM Weiland , where I pulled the above image from.

Only Time Will Tell

And this is me done for this time. The day job and revising Masque are taking up all my time lately, but I think about how we can get back to appreciating nuance in our world. There are so many extremes, so many ‘my way or the highway’ types of thinking that I wonder what we’re really losing by staying so far apart. Society comes from the mid-16th century French word that means companionship and friendly association with others and it’s increasingly obvious that those concepts are crumbling around us into tiny pockets that barely comprise a neighborhood. Integrity is another concept, associated with society in my mind, that is also decaying as a concept. They’re not unrelated, at least, but that’s for another time.

I’m an idealist at my core which is part of why writing is something I do. My generation was taught by Schoolhouse Rock, in between Saturday morning cartoons, that America was a melting pot and the more flavor we put in, the better the ultimate result would be. I recognize that ideal and acknowledge the problems inherent in that time that have continued to today. America isn’t perfect, hasn’t been, may never be. But it’s a good thing when it works. We just have to make sure it works for more of the population than it has in the past. To mix metaphors, striving for the ideal is akin to doing all you can to save the sauce that broke instead of throwing it out and starting over. I’m not ready to give up yet. I hope you aren’t, either.

Read outside your comfort zone. Listen to someone you would ordinarily ignore. Try to see the other side, even if you really disagree with it. Practice some empathy. Hang in there. I’m with you.

I’ll see you when I see you.

*I’m aware of the issues around NaNoWriMo. I participated a long, long time before that stuff bubbled up.

The collector surveyed the first room, their eyes scanning the towers with their shelves that slide toward the explorer that fill it. They walk through the stacks and see the content labels: Adventure, Crisis, Fear. The second room is almost as large, also containing esoteric ephemera like posters and postcards from various ages, framed and displayed atop the stacks and facing every direction.

By the time they reach the third room, there are rare maquettes on view. This is where the caretaker drones are at their work dusting the little statues. They stop at a particular shelf and pull it out. One of the three bins is of particular interest and they select one of the sleeves, admiring the colors, the energy of the composition. They imagine how it must have appeared in public the first time. 

They consider withdrawing the periodical from the sleeve to actually read it for the first time. But — no. That would ruin the fantasy.

Hi, I’m Jason and I write stories that you might like. Thanks for stopping by.

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Systems UpdateAs Alive As You Need Me To Be

Finishing a draft is a big deal. First, you FINISHED and that’s absolutely worth celebrating. Second, now you get to focus on the finer points of the story. Third, you FINISHED it, man! Way to go!

So. I’ve finished the seventh draft of Masque, Second of All the Devils Are Here and I’m really proud of the quality of the story. Drafts one through three were all finished and they were okay, but when I started looking at what I’d written I saw that there was a lot of character background and worldbuilidng that actually should have been pre-writing. And I was bogged down in establishing all that within the story. 

The next revelation was that I’d started the story way too early. I’d tried, in each draft, to start the story in different places, later and later in the timeline and when I finally found the right place, everything came together. I was able to rewrite key sections from other drafts and expand ideas, lose a character here and there and expand others. All the writing I’d done to that point informed everything that was coming out of me into this draft.

Seven drafts… that seems like a lot, doesn’t it? It is, but the important bit to remember is that at every stage of the development of this story, I’ve been able to come up with new moments that make the story if not better, at least MORE. That means that my engagement with it, through every draft, has been constant. 

Each chapter has been summarized and after some time away from it, I reread the summaries.This revealed some issues with the plot and some missing details of character. At that level, I found it easier to fix and see how it ripples across the rest of the plot. With that done, I have my re-write strategy and have begun a pass that has me even more engaged with the story. I’m always looking for ways to improve on the translation from head to hand to page and enjoying the process. 

I think you’re going to like it. It’s some of my favorite of my writing.

Thinking Out LoudPlanet Telex

Speaking of ‘favorite’… One of the truly, deeply annoying aspects of social media is the judgment of what is ‘best’ by people who are, 99 times out of 100, wholly unqualified to assess things. Best and worst are assessments.

We have, as a society, fallen into a trap of thinking that every opinion is valid. (Feel free to discount this one, but if you read all the way through you may end up agreeing.) Critiquing art is much more than just saying “It’s great!” or “It sucks!” and requires a certain amount of training to do effectively. Most folks on social media (and in what passes for journalism on the Internet now as a result of social media) aren’t qualified to critique anything and never offer an opinion as a starting point. Instead they offer absolutes (best or worst) and don’t have the valid experience or other critiques to offer in support of something being ‘best’ or ‘worst’. 

I include myself in this group. I have boosted things as ‘the best!’ and decried some popular media as ‘the worst!’ much to my chagrin. So, I am as unqualified as 99% of the Internet to determine the goodness or greatness or awfulness of just about any popular media. However…

But I do know what I like. And I can usually tell you why I like it. You don’t have to agree, it’s my opinion. And going forward, I will talk about just about everything as a ‘favorite’ or ‘something I really like’ instead of judging it best or worst. If I say something is ‘best’ you can safely assume that it’s a subjective judgment on my part.  Give it a try yourself unless you love arguing with people on the Internet. But – aren’t there better things to do with your time?

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I’ve been trying to update here about once a month or so. If you drop your email address in the box below, you can get these things delivered right to you when they happen without waiting for me to put a link up on social media. There are things coming as we get nearer the release of Masque that you may want to know about, so… whaddaya say?

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Things I LikeOn the Wings of Maybe

While we’re on the subject of judging things, Becoming Led Zeppelin was — interesting. If you’re not at all familiar (or maybe passingly familiar) with the band except for the music, this documentary is for you. The nicest part about it is hearing from John Bonham via recorded interviews and that’s something I’ve been missing from the histories of the band since his death. I’m fairly well acquainted with the lore and understand Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, and John Paul Jones only wanting to talk about the good stuff, but it’s disappointing to not hear from them directly about their ‘songwriting’ process that involved lifting (sometimes extensively) from others without crediting them. 

I found it to be a well done documentary that’s heavy on extended excerpts of songs as well as live footage that’s previously or long unseen and pretty light on substantive information. It covers their formation, the first album development, the tour and recording of Led Zeppelin II and a bit after its release.

I’ve recently completed a rewatch of Stranger Things in preparation for the new season around the holidays and I’ll tell you if this isn’t one of the best ‘how Jean Grey Becomes Phoenix’ -type stories, I don’t know what is. I don’t know how it’s going to end but if Eleven/Jane/El doesn’t end up alone and super-powerful I will be pleasantly surprised.

The Rushworth Family Plot, book 4 of Miss Tilney & Mr. Darcy

I’m now into season 4 of The Bear and I’m reading Claudia Gray’s latest Miss Tilney and Mr. Darcy mystery and enjoying the heck out of both. (Any of the streamers that turns these books into a series will have me as a subscriber, by the way.) And how about that new NIN song that was just released from the Tron: Ares soundtrack that comes out this fall? It’s nice to have Trent Reznor and the NIN energy back like this.

I stream music to listen to entire albums while I’m working or writing. Mixes and lists are good sometimes, but I like albums. In my youth I’d sit next to the stereo with my headphones on looking at the 12”x12” album art and studying the liner notes and lyrics. Sometimes I miss that. But, have you ever lost track of a band you loved years ago? Happens to me all the time and I’ve recently revisited Big Wreck’s first album, In Loving Memory Of…, since finding out they have a new album coming in October. 

At Capacity

It’s pretty grim in America right now. Ugly. Cruel. I wish I had words that would be of some comfort. I wish our leaders had the capacity to understand that words of comfort matter. I wish my fellow citizens had the vision and the will to have avoided this. 

But when you wish in one hand and shit in the other, which fills up first?

Each of us is dealing with this in our own way and it takes its toll. Me? I went back to the theater to see James Gunn’s Superman and boy did I enjoy that one. I enjoyed it a lot. Just like everyone else. It was a terrific escape from – all of this.

All we can do is hang on tight to the ones we love and do what we can to weather the storm. So hang in there, be good to yourself as often as necessary, and I will see you when I see you.

This is a special note that’s not necessarily about writing but I try to tie it together at the end. You can absolutely skip this update if it doesn’t fit what you want from me.

I hope you’re familiar with the Schoolhouse Rock lessons that ran on Saturday mornings in the 1970s in between cartoon shows. An entire generation can recite the Declaration of Independence because it was put to a snappy tune and given an infectious melody.

(That’s from the America Rock collection. There’s also Math Rock, Grammar Rock, and Science Rock. They all, well – rock.)

One of the lessons is called No More Kings. Here it is:

Rockin’ and-a rollin’, splishin’ and-a splashin’…

Remember that it’s from the 70s and it’s a high-level history lesson. The message is that America didn’t want to be a colony, didn’t want to be part of an Empire. (Yeah, there are a lot of problems with our history but let’s stay focused on the idea of being free for the moment, okay?)

Across America today there are some 2,000 protests under the banner “No Kings” in response to the current administration’s policies and tactics. It’s important to note that this administration is only in its fifth month and the first reports I’ve seen say that more than a million people have gathered in cities up and down the east coast of the USA to voice their displeasure. This falls under the famous First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom to peaceably assemble. It reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

These are rights that the administration ignores on a regular basis, often threatening those who speak. It’s chilling.

Via Muppet History on Facebook

When we recite the Pledge of Allegiance, the last line is “with liberty and justice for all.” That doesn’t mean liberty and justice for only the people you like. It means everyone. Look around and see who is being denied justice. Do you agree with that? Or should everyone in America, where we declared that all are created equal, have the same opportunities to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

Why does it matter if someone lives their life differently than you? Are they hurting you in any real way or are you just offended by the idea of difference? Do you eat food from different cultures? You won’t have that diversity if we continue on the path America is on. Difference needs to be celebrated.

If you grew up here, you have pledged allegiance to America from grade school on. Have you forgotten what it means? If you want to see what America is really about, I recommend going to a naturalization ceremony. You will never feel more American than you will right there.

There’s a Daily Show video of Jon Stewart addressing a question about the American Dream. Here’s the transcript:

“The dream doesn’t die, man.

We are in a moment of tumult but you have to keep perspective. That is what the fight is. Nothing of value comes to you without a fight. But the lens of history, you understand this…We went through Watergate and Vietnam. They assassinated every good person we had in a decade span. This has always been a fight.

And even if the guy you wanted or the woman you wanted to be president, to get the position, if you think it won’t still be a fight you’re wrong.

The arc of the moral history is long and it bends toward justice. Right? But it doesn’t bend by itself, it’s not fucking gravity. People have to bend it. You have to bend it. And there’s going to be people trying to bend it the other fucking way and we’re not gonna let that happen.”

These are questions each of us has to face alone and answer for ourselves. Are you bending the moral arc of history towards justice for all or justice for you and the people you like? Do you believe in the melting pot of America? Or would you rather be in a pressure cooker of stress and anger? Do you believe all are created equal?

I believe America is stronger when we work together and embrace our diversity. The more ideas we have, the better. I have a pretty good life and everyone deserves the same.

Creator unknown. Happy to credit them if I find out.

The pressure cooker we’re in now has kept me from writing as much as I’d like. Chaotic policies are creating havoc across multiple sectors of our society and affecting each and every one of us. There will be a number of novels, short stories, movies, even music videos that will have a comment on what’s happening in America today.

Current events have definitely influenced my work in progress beyond limiting my time writing by informing how some characters behave and interact with one another. I’m not trying to influence anyone one way or the other, but truth works its way into fiction and that’s important to remember. I think great fiction presents both sides of its argument in serious, cogent ways, truthful ways.

And truth is important now, more than ever.

Thanks for reading. Stay true to yourself and be safe if you’re out there protesting. Stay hydrated.

Also, my apologies for the initial post being poorly edited. I was in a hurry and only caught one passage that had been duplicated. My only excuse was my passion for this missive going out ASAP. I’m human, folks.

I’ll see you when I see you.

It’s been a minute since we last touched base. Updates you haven’t seen have been implemented in the background and while they’ve been somewhat automated, they’re still taking up energy and onboard RAM as well as any outboard brains that I’ve connected to. I’m not sure what any of that really means, but it sounded fancy for a second.

Meanwhile, spring has been lovely here. I know because the weather while I’ve been out in the yard thinking about the writing I need to be doing has been very pleasant. My morning walks with the dog are still chilly and they trigger more thoughts about the writing, thoughts I explore on my morning commute.

Hi, I’m Jason and I write stories you might like to read. Thanks for coming by. If you’d like to get these very infrequent missives delivered straight to your inbox, put your email in the box below. 

Systems Update: TRUTH

As noted in the opening, work continues on the latest draft of MASQUE which is on track to be out to you sometime in the fall. I had plans at the end of March/beginning of April  to be writing 1,000 words a day which I’d been able to do for nearly a week when I made them.

Then, of course, life comes with other plans and anything I wanted went sailing right out the window. There’s a period of about twenty days where I accomplished a total of 2,000 words across five writing sessions and that made the stress I felt even worse. I’m as dedicated to getting this book out as I am to making it the best it can possibly be so there’s some friction in that, but quality matters and I need time to deliver that.

I will say this draft, even though you’ve heard it from me before, is the best version so far. It’s moving along, it’s tense, it’s steamy in places. I’m pretty sure you’re going to like it.

PIN UPS

This is an announcement that there will be other announcements down the road regarding some irons I’ve placed in a fire. I’m negotiating a few things that will begin to happen in the fall, hopefully around the time of Masque’s release.

So if you don’t want to miss the announcements when they DO drop, it’s easy to keep your ear to the ground and your eyes open by subscribing. You can use the box up top or wait until you get to the end of this post.

Stella is waiting patiently to subscribe so we can go for a walk…

FEEDBACK

I’ve recently read Nnedi Okorafor’s DEATH OF THE AUTHOR and I’m not going to give it a review, despite my immense enjoyment, other than to say that it’s an important book. Not just to me, but ultimately to the genre of science fiction. It’s got all the elements of speculation and interaction that make SF great. Others will determine how this book fits into the overall scheme of SF but my assessment is that Okorafor is a Grand Master-to-be and this work will be at the top of the list of all her titles. I’m really, really looking forward to her collaboration with artist Tana Ford this fall, THE SPACE CAT. (If you haven’t read their previous collaboration, LA GUARDIA, and you’re a comics/sff fan, you should!)

As is usual for me, I’m late to the party on getting into THE MINUS 5. The three songs I’ve heard off their latest album, OAR ON, PENELOPE!, are some great, garage-y type rock that is good in the car and on a walk. In particular, I’m really digging LET THE ROPE HOLD, CASSIE LEE which is super-catchy. I’ve had CALLING CORTEZ, their previous album, on repeat lately, too.

Watched THINGS TO COME (1936) which is based on H.G. Wells’ novel The Shape of Things to Come from 1933, and it’s prescient for its time in a number of ways.The film was supposed to be Hollywood’s answer to METROPOLIS and was just as expensive and sprawling. Wells adapted his book for the screen and there’s some overwritten expository dialogue that drives home the ideas a little too much and it relies heavily on rolling text to move through time but the script does some things very well, making it more than serviceable. Director William Cameron Menzies creates convincing visuals of a crumbling society desperately trying to adapt to its new realities. The hair, makeup, and costumes are top-notch, too. A lot of attention was paid to details to convince the viewer of the reality of the film. This attention really shows in every flying scene and the designs of the aircraft involved.

I’d never seen Things to Come when it ran endlessly on the UHF channels of my youth because as a teenager I was probably less interested in ‘old’ movies having seen the future of filmmaking in STAR WARS. Also, the thought of a third world war was an impossibility in my young mind, except if someone launched a nuclear attack. (Hey, THE DAY AFTER – a damn TV movie – scared the living shit out of all of us at the time.) If that happened, I knew that ‘duck and cover’ was a placebo. I’d been reading and consuming science fiction about the effects of nuclear war, including BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, which is also a scary film. I digress…

This film, along with METROPOLIS, FORBIDDEN PLANET, FLASH GORDON, and a handful of others comprise the roots of filmed science fiction as we know it today. (There are a lot of roots but these are the ones that were prominent in the literature of science fiction as I grew love of genre in my youth.) Each of them executed a vision that was singular and boundary-pushing in its time. Each of them prove that so much is possible when the will to create is strong. For a long, long time science fiction was cheap and schlocky and disrespected. Now, with the advent of awesome special effects, bigger stories can be told and told well. 

And if I’m being honest, when ANDOR was announced my thinking was ‘who cares’? ROGUE ONE was a terrific film that paid homage in small ways to the root films of its genre, and Andor is advancing what big stories on the small screen can do when combining good writing with ingenuity. I’ve gone from my initial indifference as I began the first season when it aired to favoring Andor over all other Star Wars TV shows. How will such things compare to what’s available in 2110?

Just in case you’re wondering where any of these things might be streaming, I’ve found Just Watch to be really helpful. I use it to find things I don’t have a physical copy of. 

At Capacity: VICTIMS OF THE FUTURE

I’m getting back to writing on a daily basis and that’s good for my mental health. It’s not great for the physical state of my body, however, so there’s still some balance to be struck but I’ve made some strides in this regard this year so far. I’ve shed some weight, found time to be active, and am generally eating better than I have in far too long.. 

As I’ve been learning what triggers my eating binges I’m learning to make substitutions for things that do – when I focus – give me the same kind of stimulus. It’s true that baby carrots are not a 1:1 substitute for some cheap rippled potato chips, but the crunch when I bite into them is similar. And the sound of the crunch is similar, too. Both help trick my brain because it wants to be tricked into feeling satisfied.

What I’m getting at is the psychological aspects of eating have been a mystery to me most of my life. Yeah, I can repeat the tropes everyone else can, but when I made the clear-headed decision to do something about how much I weighed, I started really absorbing the stuff that I’d always known, and paying attention. It’s not as simple as “eat less and exercise more” for a lot of people, but that reductive piece of advice is true in its way. For me, it’s more like “eat better and exercise more”.

I just needed a bit more explanation.

So thanks for reading. And if you’re a regular here, I appreciate you more than I can ever say. (By the way, all the header titles are the names of albums where The Yardbirds’ song, The Shape of Things to Come, have been covered. Jeff Beck, David Bowie, RUSH, and Gary Moore have all done spectacular versions though Moore’s is a favorite for reasons I may share another time. The original is a protest song against the Vietnam War and Beck was the guitarist.)

If you’re inclined to like this post and subscribe, I’m happy to provide a way you can do that. Just drop your email in the box below and you’ll get the next post and as many as you want that follow. 

Take care of yourself. You matter a great deal to many that you may not be aware of. 

I’ll see you when I see you.

Weightless, he floats through the hallway of his childhood home toward the dining room. There he looks at the table settings, admiring the precision with which each setting is measured not only from the edge of the table but from the salad fork to the teaspoon. The pattern was simple but very colorful, almost Fiesta-style. It had never been set that way ever before. He moves on.

In the kitchen he grabs hold of the oven rail, jerking gently to a stop. The window. Outside the window there are stars. Not trees or a sidewalk or a street, no other homes. Nothing but stars. He briefly wonders how this is possible since he was sure he was awake though unaware of how he’d been transported or when. Now he wonders for what purpose he’s been transported. Why he’s been made to feel comfortable.

Then it dawns on him. A blue screen appears out of thin air with the word EAT in big yellow letters and an arrow pointing back to the dining room. Grimly, he decides his first obligation is to escape.

Hi. I’m Jason. I write stories you might like to read. Thanks for stopping by. 

This post was made by a human for other humans to take in.

Creator unknown to me.Good Clear Syncopation

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Don’t You Hesitate At All

Most writers have jobs and create their worlds in what everyone refers to as Spare Time. This time comes at the expense of other things like hanging out with friends, watching a favorite show, or – sometimes – eschewing family time or sleep. The lucky ones who can write as their main job should be envied, but the rest of us should understand that they did the work to get to that point, often beginning with their Spare Time. They earned the ability to write full-time the same as any of the rest of us can.

Now that we’ve established that anyone can be a full-time writer if they put in the time and their work is well received, let’s talk about how to approach finding the balance between paying the bills and working toward the future.

My Spare Time has been limited in the extreme so far this year. It demands fifty-plus hours a week and has for the last nine months, give or take. I have dreams about work sometimes, waking up in the middle of the night to wonder if I booked a room for a meeting later that afternoon. I’ve taken on other responsibilities related to where I work, too, and those take up more time and headspace. It’s good work and the effects of what I’ve been involved in are visible. There’s satisfaction in what I do.

But I’ve had almost zero energy for writing once I do the things I need to do for work at home. It’s worried me a couple of times, to be honest. But when I’ve been able to open my notes or even rework the plot, I get the feeling that everything I was doing prior to the promotion that’s taking up my time is still inside just waiting for things to even out again. 

In the meantime, I’m writing in my journals and breaking the plot for MASQUE again. These things are enabling me to utilize what Spare Time I have effectively by keeping the gears turning and feeling like I’m making some kind of progress. Every day I can work on the book, I have more than I did the day before and – for now – that’s enough.

Treat it Good, Treat it Rightly

Several years ago I was almost done with my morning commute to the day job when the Check Engine light came on, began to flash, and my car slowed on the highway to 35 mph. I freaked OUT. 

I’m not at all mechanical and there were any number of things that could be wrong according to the car’s manual in my glove box. I limped the car to a mechanic a block away from my job and waited to see what was wrong.

That was the day I learned about OBD (On Board Diagnostics) codes. On my way home that day (the car was easily fixed while I worked) I stopped at an automotive store and purchased an OBD-II scanner for about $40 US. On several occasions, it’s served to keep me from losing my mind when the check engine light popped on as late as a couple of weeks ago. 

I plugged in the OBD scanner and a code lit up the screen. I went to the website for the scanner manufacturer, put in the make and model of my car, entered the code and learned that there might have been a problem with the catalytic converter. I called my mechanic and he said the car would run okay as long the engine light wasn’t blinking. Relieved, I took the car in a day later and was told it was, indeed the catalytic converter and it would cost about $4,000 to replace it. 

I chose not to get the repair and a day later, the light went out and has never come back on. 

Anyway, the scanner has been something valuable and I wanted to pass that on here. This article from Car and Driver goes into some depth about various devices if you’re interested.

Sunshine Shine on You

I think I’ve mentioned this here before, but one of the monthly books I get at my Local Comic Shop is DC’s Poison Ivy by writer G. Willow Wilson and artist Marcio Takara. Following Pamela Isley through her past as she navigates the Green lately has been a true joy. Well, for me at least. Her and her crew are currently stuck in a remnant of the past that gets more dangerous the longer they stay. It’s fun and often thought-provoking.

I’ve always believed that Ivy was a truly important antagonist for Batman. She has larger views that are aligned with things we regular humans don’t give two seconds of thought to. Ivy recognizes this and knows that, because we don’t care about the place we live the way we should, we never will and that’s damning for everyone. 

Wilson writes and Takara draws this series in a way that recalls Terry Moore’s brilliant Strangers in Paradise but is its own thing completely. There’s a lot of human emotion here, perhaps because of Ivy’s desire to save the planet over the people. Her relationships with Harley (who figures only peripherally in this series) and sidekick Janet-from-HR feel real which heightens the fantasy elements when she dives into the Green. 

There are four volumes of the series collected for you if you want to hunt them down at your local library or your nearby local comic shop.

As You Happen to See…

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AT CAPACITY: Drown in Stylistic Audacity

The last couple of months I haven’t spent the same amount of time on social media as I used to. I’m a bit disconnected from the memes and the politics of my country at the moment as a result, but it’s something that’s been brewing for quite a while.

I was going to write about extreme opposites like love and hate and how it makes social media even more tedious than usual but that’s ground that’s already well covered by others.

Instead, I’m going to say that my lack of spare time to write has ridden me to the edge of being burned out. The demands of the day job have been significant this year and I need some down time. Like – NOW. So instead of taking my already planned time off this week to attend Planet Comicon, I’m going to stay home, do some work around the house, reconnect with some family, and nap. I wish I was going to be there but honestly it would only further exhaust me and I need to get back up and running pretty quickly. No rest for the wicked and all that. I may have one appearance later in the year. Stay tuned.

For real.

All the headings in this post come from lyrics on Yes’ most listener-friendly album, 90125, which was released in 1984. It’s a happy album, or at least joyful, and easy to sing along with which wasn’t always true of their earlier, more progressive efforts. This video over on YouTube is impressive as one of the all-time great drummers, Kenny Aronoff, attempts to decode the original percussion parts of one of the album’s better known songs, Changes, without knowing what the original drum tracks held. Many thanks to Ande Parks for pointing me to it.

And with that, I’m out for this time. Be good to yourself so you can be good to others, friends. We are all in this together.

See you when I see you.

As social media continues to prove it’s all about the content we users provide for free that enriches the billionaires who dreamed of being billionaires long ago, I wanted to put this out into the world again:

Creator unknown. Found on the Internet sometime in 2024.

I write science fiction stories with an art-house approach. That is, I’m more interested in writing things that relate to people and how they arrived at that particular future and what they’re going to do about it. It might’ve been classed as ‘social science fiction’ back in the day but I’m incorporating a little more than the classic stuff. So not quite Star Trek but less fantasy and (hopefully) more cerebral than Star Wars. Less pulpy than Stan Lee’s and Jack Kirby’s groundbreaking science fiction comics (Fantastic Four, for instance), but not as literary as Michael Moorcock’s fantasies. I’m looking at our motivations, what makes us human as far as I can tell. I think we should be concerned with more than just being entertained because there are myriad influences pushing us together and pulling us apart in the real world and that that’s fair game for a story. This means there’s likely more talking than big action sequences in my books, but I use those as needed to move people along their path. So yeah, art house.

Every word in my stories, in my books is mine (or my co-author’s). I don’t use artificial intelligence, I don’t use prompts, and I do my best not to show my influences too clearly. My books are my work for good or ill. I’m a human doing human things and making human mistakes, celebrating human wins. I co-wrote a novella, Rudow Can’t Fail, that has been compared favorably to Richard K. Morgan, Max Allan Collins, and Philip K. Dick if that helps you decide. The first book in the All the Devils Are Here series, The Envoy, was hailed as “An edge-of-the seat galactic and political thriller!” on GoodReads. It’s available through Kindle Unlimited if that’s the way you read.

There’s an audience around this kind of writing and I’d like to see if I can interest some of them in what I’m doing. I try to reach as many as I can, but as you know it’s a struggle. So I depend on word of mouth.

If you’ve read one of my books, thank you. Would you mind rating it wherever you do such things? Would you mind telling someone you know who might like it about the book? Even just an occasional reposting of a note that I have books available is very much appreciated.

Hey, you can even share this post and encourage others to sign up below to get these (very infrequent) posts delivered to their inbox directly when I publish one. They’ll drop no more than twice a month and that will be rare, I promise. Just type your email into the box down there to get started.

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No matter what happens I’m going to keep writing. I’m going to keep publishing however I can because I don’t know how to stop. Sometimes it takes a little longer to get a book together because I work full-time and have a reasonably interesting life outside of that and writing. Sometimes I’ll write about what I’m reading or listening to (today would have been David Bowie’s 78th birthday and I’m listening to The Next Day and Blackstar). I’ll always be honest with you.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for sharing. I’m glad we’re on this Earth at the same time and have a chance to connect. I look forward to hearing from you in the comments and I’ll see you when I see you.

It’s the end of the year as we know it, and I feel fine.

Really. I’ve been resting and relaxing since December 21st and not doing much. Recharging. It’s a real privilege to have eleven days in a row off with pay and I’m enjoying it.

How about you? 

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ORGAN OF RECORD: MASQUE

This is an update I wish I wasn’t typing but at the same time I am pleased about it. It shows progress as a writer.

I’ve had to scrap the current draft because I finally twigged that the middle of the plot was so mushy that I had lost the purpose of the book in the first place. Even though I’d attempted to stick to my plot, I was adding layers that were just muddying up an already soupy mess of a story. So, feeling recharged, I began reading the last time I’d summarized the plot, chapter by chapter, and realized how far from that I’d moved. So I began remapping the plot through the arc of each character.

Now I’m seeing what needs to happen and when so much more clearly. Scenes aren’t necessarily changing, but the focus will, and the goal of each scene is better defined, leading to chapters that are now coherent.

This happened because I’ve been distracted with work and life stuff. When I was writing, I was just writing, not paying attention to the stuff I mentioned above. I was just pumping out words. Even when I slowed down, I was still just typing away, hacking at the thick underbrush of a story that had problems from day one.

So it’s frustrating that I have to start over again, the sixth time, but as I’ve been reconstructing and restructuring the plot I’ve found myself enjoying the process again. That’s something I’d lost sometime here in 2024. I can’t promise when Masque will drop, but I’m very confident it will be sometime in the middle of 2025. 

Dear Readers, I apologize for this inconvenience. I’m really trying to make this the best it can be because I want you to see what I see in my head. Not exactly, but something very close because it’s a beautiful vision of a man coming to terms with his abilities and shortcomings as he fights for a home he’s never been to but feels connected with. 

I don’t know who made this, but thank you. I will credit them if I find out.SOCIAL MEDIA ONE

I’ve left a couple of groups on social media platforms of late because they were no longer providing the content I’d signed up for. One was writing-related and the other was science and both started posting memes that were only designed for engagement. I don’t know if the admins have abandoned the groups or if they were taken over or what, but they weren’t for me any more.

Leaving was as simple as going to the group’s page and clicking “Leave Group” with no need for a mic drop or any ‘see ya later’ drama. If a group is that far gone none of it matters anyway and what’s important is that I no longer have to see the crap that irked me.

Easy.

THE WORLD’S FIRST SUPERHERO

Doc Savage debuted in Doc Savage Magazine #1 (cover dated March 1933), a full five years before Superman in Action Comics #1 (cover dated June 1938) thanks to the talents of Lester Dent (writing under Street & Smith’s house name Kenneth Robeson). So it’s not a stretch that the Man of Bronze (the title of that first story) should own the title of World’s First Superhero. At least for the purposes of my writing about him here.

Doc and his crew were part of my formative years during the heyday of Bantam’s republishing of their adventures in slim paperbacks for 50 cents to $1.75 over the years with covers by James Bama, Boris Vallejo, and later Bob Layton. At least, those are the ones in my collection. Of the original 182 supersagas (published from ‘33 to 1949, an amazing run!) I own 66 of the stories across 54 volumes from Bantam, plus a smattering of reprints from Nostalgia Ventures and 5 of the 6 tales bound in hardcover from Golden Press. (I’m on the hunt for a copy of Man of Bronze in that format to make that run complete.) Those covers were by Ben Otero and the books retailed for – get this – $1.75. 

I watched the George Pal movie as many times as I could catch it on one of the UHF channels of my youth, and cheered when I heard Arnold Schwarzenegger was considering playing Doc around the time of True Lies. He would have been >perfect< at the time but alas, he had political aspirations that won out.

Anyway, I collected these books as much as I could as a kid and through the years, savoring every adventure, sometimes cringing at things that shouldn’t have been written and sometimes aghast at the quality of storytelling that came from the high-pressure pulp system during the Great Depression. They remain some of my favorite books despite their problems.

So when I stumbled across a trove of these recently, my inner child cackled with glee and started picking out the ones whose titles had always fascinated him/me. I’m happy to have significantly expanded my collection, but happy that of the thirty or more I left behind, they’ll have homes before too long. Finding these out in the wild any more is a rarity.

Two of these are duplicates of books I already had, but they upgrades in quality. HEX is one I’ve never encountered in the wild before. Curious to read it.SOCIAL MEDIA TWO

Over on Threads, I had a couple of posts get some more attention than I’m used to. Likes, views, reposts, comments, it’s all a bit beyond me normally but it’s exciting see those numbers ramp up. Of course what also comes along with that are the folks with differing opinions who assert those opinions in interesting ways. I see it, like you do, all the time. They fail to read the original post closely and dump their thought without any care for the original post. 

I’m not describing anything that you all don’t already know but it’s a new experience to me. I’ve decided that the best way to deal with those who want to display their preferences as absolutes is to let them until they turn nasty. Look, you like what you like and I like what I like. Both things can be true and we don’t have to have an argument about it.

Really, we don’t.

BOOKS I ENJOYED THIS YEAR

Below is a quick list of the books that affected me the most this year. 

JAMES by Percival Everett was the best book I read in 2024. It’s a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the slave Jim. That perspective is remarkable enough that it’s a whole new story which echoes the present day in a sometimes terrifying way. You don’t have to be familiar with the original to appreciate what happens. I can’t recommend this book enough.

The Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II is one of those figures I’ve found credible and fascinating as long as I’ve been aware of him and his book WHITE POVERTY is a cogent explanation of where America is as a nation. I read this months after Everett’s book but they are worthy companions. The author’s insights into how people think are not necessarily revelatory, but framed in this context are inspirational, offering an approach to beginning to solve the problem of poverty for all.

I watched N.K. Jemisin’s Masterclass when I had that service and the second book in The Great Cities duology, THE WORLD WE MAKE, was fun, scary, engrossing, and touches on cosmic horror in juxtaposition to human connection. Everything she covered in her class is on full display in this novel, making it valuable not just as entertainment, but as the result of sharing process. Terrific fun.

There’s so much packed into R.F. Kuang’s Nebula and Locus Award-winning ‘arcane history’ BABEL that it’s best for me to say that this book’s world is so rich, so well defined that it’s difficult to believe it’s not real. Reading this then watching SAY NOTHING brings into sharp relief the ways of thinking that lead to violence that can change the world. I’m not advocating blowing stuff up, but understanding why someone can come to that conclusion is much clearer afterwards.

These four books weren’t the only ones I read this year, but the ones that definitely stuck with me after. Notably, I was pleased to read all three of Claudia Gray’s MR. DARCY & MISS TILNEY books and I’m looking forward to the 4th in 2025. I read Nnedi Okorafor and Michael Moorcock and a book on leadership that all affected me in different ways. I’m reading the new Haruki Murakami (savoring it, really) and I’m anxious to have Okorafor’s DEATH OF THE AUTHOR in hand next month.

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AT CAPACITY

It’s worth noting here that President Jimmy Carter’s passing was announced today. He was 100 years old. Regardless of your politics it’s unquestionable that he lived his faith in full view of us. He set an example of how to be good and do good that we, as a society, would do well to emulate as well as we possibly can. He helped people he didn’t know and expected nothing in return for doing so.

I’ll be thinking about that a lot as I head into the New Year. How can I make a tiny difference every day to just one person? And what might the ripples of that be? How many others could be affected because I held a door open for someone? Or because I took a shopping cart back to the corral? What happens when I buy books from my local bookstores instead of through the juggernaut on the Internet? 

I have a feeling these kinds of things will matter a great deal in the short term. But I’m also interested to see what happens if a bunch of us make a more concerted effort to be kind and engage in our local economies? 

Could be nothing. But it could be MASSIVE.

Wishing everyone in my orbit happy holidays, a bright future, and all the merriment you can stand. Let peace for all to be who they are, to love who they love, and to live their best lives be our objective in the coming year. 

See you when I see you.

For forty-seven years Barry has been running from the memory of the still-crisp melody that haunts him whether he’s awake or not and everything that happened then. When he does sleep, he dreams of lights, red, orange, and white that set the landscape on fire. That experience from his early childhood permeated his entire life thereafter, and dozens of later encounters reinforced a sense of otherness that kept him from assimilating properly into adulthood and society. His mother had done all she could for him though she was plagued by similar demons and the tragedy of her widowhood. They were both lonely and alone but they had each other. 

When his mother died, she left him the remainder of her inheritance along with most of the life insurance which he then used to live almost entirely off the beaten path. He’d never been able to sustain an intimate relationship other than with his memories and the dreams that found him every night. Normally he felt trapped as he drove all over the country, but lately he was feeling cornered. It started when he was on his way home from a gathering of almost friends, others who had similar experiences but he’d met no one who’d actually been Away like him. 

It was almost midnight, the sky was cloudy and the half moon was low in the sky, but it was wrong. Too yellow and on the wrong angle. The heavy clouds above made it look like it was a pizza cutter coming through the bottom of a thick crust. Three days later, at dusk, there was an unusually brilliant light in the same part of the sky, where there shouldn’t have been a star, or a planet, hanging motionless, commanding his attention. He pulled over on the highway, got out and took pictures with his aging burner phone. When he looked at them at the house he’d rented for the last three months, there was no unusually bright light. There was no star. That’s when the uncertainty that had been creeping along the edges of his awareness was replaced with dread.

Barry knew they were coming again.

Hi. I’m Jason and I write science fiction that might be best described as ‘art house’ if anything.* You can find my books here.

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ORGAN OF RECORD: MASQUE

Words have been happening! Work is proceeding! Yay! For those just joining us here, this book started its life as a short story that I kept thinking about. How did the main character get to that point? What happened that turned him so bitter? What might happen after the ending?

So I wrote another short story exploring the aftermath, allowing forgiveness that would mean the MC could move forward. Both stories had an ounce of strangeness to them that I kept thinking about long after they were released into the wild. When it came time for me to collect my shorts into the A MAP OF THE PROBLEM volume, I combined them into one story and added a bit for continuity and that triggered more thoughts. 

Then, a few years later, as I was planning what would become my All the Devils Are Here series, I still had an itch to really explore more about the character, his life, and the pain he’d been through and knew it would easily connect to Walt’s story in ENVOY. I thought, “Hey, I’ll write a novella and get to do all these things!”

So, once ENVOY was out in the world I turned my attention to expanding the two short stories (which was now really one) and fleshing out the characters. This was so much fun that when I finished the first draft of MASQUE, I had about 48,000 words that left a lot of room for more exploration. I thought maybe I could trim a bit here and there and keep it a novella, put it out and move on, but my brain said, “nope, keep going.” The second draft was about 60,000 words and it still wasn’t satisfying enough. I wanted to know MORE.

Well, what was once a couple of short stories has grown into a full-fledged novel and I’m not even to the point of the original tales yet as I approach 60,000 words written. This is the longest sustained work in over a decade and I’m having the time of my life doing it. I’m imagining the final product will be somewhere between 90,000 and 100,000 words.

To be clear: it’s taking longer because I have less time to write. My day job has taken more time and brainspace than when I began this book and I’m aiming for a late spring release which I think is still realistic at this point. However, I’m not marrying myself to a schedule. Writing takes as long as it takes and it’ll get out there when it’s ready and not before. I’m working hard on the craft here, taking time with the characters and sometimes making them more interesting later in the story requires going back and seeding those details earlier. 

It’s not the easiest way to write and it’s not my normal process, but it’s how this book is working out. While I’d hoped to have it out this year I’m not disappointed I didn’t make it. The book is better with each draft and I’m lucky I’m an independent author and not beholden to publishing schedules at this point. I’m good with that.

If you’re awaiting this not-quite-a-sequel, I’m sorry it’s taking so much time. My output is about half what I am used to because of Life. Despite that, you can count on the fact that I am working on it steadily, every day, and there’s forward progress every single day.

I’m grateful for your patience.

Mail Call

I realized a week ago that this year I’ve spent more money on books than I have on booze for the first time in decades. I’m searching out all kinds of reading material despite having a massive To Be Read shelf and it’s a blast finding something that I didn’t think was ever going to be available.

Getting a copy of Michael Moorcock’s THE METATEMPORAL DETECTIVE was one of those serendipitous moments that every collector lives for. It only got one printing, never made it to paperback, and can range in price from the mid-$20s to $60 or more.

My copy arrived in what can only be described as near-mint or new and my cost was at the extreme low end of that range. This was the third try after the first two were lost in shipping from England.

This book came out in 2007 and I read it from my local library then but never bought a copy. (My financial situation was very different then and I wasn’t buying many books besides my regular comics, which I’d trimmed dramatically at that point.) While the mystery story pastiches are just that, it’s the fun of imagining Elric of Melnibone as a Professor Moriarty analogue that works for me. I’m well-acquainted with Moorcock’s Multiverse and love Jerry Cornelius, Ulrich Von Bek, and Oswald Bastable as well as Elric and other aspects of the Eternal Champion so it was nice to meet Seaton Begg and others in this book as they work against and around Monsieur (Elric) Zenith.**

I could write a lot about Moorcock’s works, their overlapping realities and intersecting moon beam roads, but here I want to point out that the John Picacio painting that adorns the cover is spectacular. The portrait of Elric is everything I expect of the character and the brandishing of the black blade Stormbringer with the Dashiell Hammett-styled Begg superimposed over it is just a perfect representation of what to expect inside. Picacio’s work is stunning and if you’re a fantasy or science fiction fan you’ve probably seen it before. Check out his website.

At Capacity

Here in the United States we’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving on Thursday. Everything shuts down for most of the day with the exception of some grocery stores and convenience stores in my town and business slows to an uphill in molasses crawl. Sometimes it’s warm, sometimes it’s not. This year we might get some snow and rain and if the high temperature climbs out of the 30s it’ll be a surprise. Every year since 2013 I say something along the lines of:

I am grateful for the air in my lungs, the love in my heart, and ideas in my head. I’m also grateful beyond belief for the ability to put my ideas out in the world and that they are received well by others who find them. 

And where that came from was an incident that is best described as “massive bilateral pulmonary emboli with the burden heaviest on the left” which is something I’ll never, ever forget. It was a significant event that was a real wake up call with every detail burned into every fiber of my being.

As we head into this year’s holiday season there’s quite a bit to be worried about. Personally, I have some health things that I need to deal with before they become real concerns but the larger world is careening into a spin that I’m not convinced will be controlled. I’m not going to say I’m not worried, but I’m trying to stay positive. When I was slowly dying in the emergency room because blood clots were clogging up my lungs – which no one suspected for a long time because I was “too young” for it to be that – they worked to figure out what was wrong with me and the nurse kept asking me my name and birthdate.

”You’re doing that to make sure I’m lucid, right?”

She smiled and replied, “Nope. I’m doing it to be annoying.”

Sasha was a real hoot and a great nurse. Breaking the ice like that, keeping me calm and upbeat was a big deal and a huge help. With that, I was able to keep my wife calm and we weathered the worst of everything and I went home a couple days later with a new lease on life. Literally. By the way, nurses saved my life and I will tell anyone who listens they are the heart and soul of every medical facility. They deserve our respect.o

I’m not saying the next few years aren’t going to be difficult and that there won’t be some spectacularly disastrous things that happen, but we can weather the worst of it and come out stronger and (hopefully) smarter on the other side. Listen to the folks trying to keep your spirits up but recognize the underlying cause of the distress and do something about it. 

And remember to take some time to be grateful for the important things in your life. So here’s this year’s version of my gratitude post:

I am grateful for the air in my lungs, the ideas in my head, and the love in my heart. I’m also grateful beyond belief for the ability to put my ideas out in the world and that they are received well by others who find them. The laughter I get to share with my closest friends and unity of cause with my colleagues are important to how I see the world and without them the world would be much darker. So I lift my head to the light and feel the heat on my face and let it warm me all the way through. I am grateful for all this and more, the little things especially.

Take care of yourself. Eat until you’re full then go back for dessert. Take a nap. Read something, watch something, listen to something and enjoy the experience. Savor it. Take a walk, take a deep breath, and about halfway on your path stop, close your eyes, and listen. That right there? That’s what I’m grateful for. The sounds of life.

I’m also deeply grateful for each of you who read here, who’ve bought my books this year and I don’t take that for granted. We are in this together.

Happy Thanksgiving and I’ll see you when I see you.

*I’ll write more about the Art House distinction in my next post. 

**I’m deeply fascinated with Moorcock’s Una Persson who shows up in stories across his Multiverse almost as often as Elric. 

Postscript

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There’s a loud, powerful pounding at the door and then the bell rings. Already aggravated that your No Solicitors sign has been ignored – yet again! – this election season, you’re ready to give the poor fool a rant on the value of their education with special emphasis on reading and comprehension. You’re surprised no one is there when you open the door. Kids; ring and run or whatever they call it now. You walk out into the driveway to look up the street but it’s empty, devoid of movement and sound but for the wind blowing leaves into neighbor’s yards. No dogs barking, no cars approaching though you can smell a fire pit on the breeze. No one is out in their front yard. It’s a nice fall night.

Bewildered, you go back inside and lock the storm door and the inner door. Once the latch is closed you turn to go back to the kitchen and that’s when you see him. Tall, dressed in a brown trench coat, spiky blond hair, a look of disappointment on his face standing in the middle of your living room, watching you. Your heart begins to race.

Hi, I’m Jason. I write things for myself and hope others will like them. 

UPBEAT

Pretty soon we’ll be deep into Talking Head Analysis Overdrive season, and that brings a lot more tedium to the news media. Still, opinion can be important, often influencing those who are unsure for whatever reason to swing their attention one way or another. I don’t agree with every opinion and I give more weight to informed, educated opinion than I do the ones that sound good in small bites, which is something that I wish everyone did. Still. Stifling opinions is not something we should do in America but it happens. Witness the Washington Post and L.A. Times owners declining to put themselves at odds with one of the candidates.

In the aftermath of Bezos spiking the WaPo endorsement for President I moved two preorders for books from Amazon to my local independent bookstore. Pricing at both was exactly the same and the only difference is that I’ll have to pick them up at the store instead of my front porch. No big deal.

The convenience of Amazon is a powerful thing and it’s valuable for stuff you can’t get locally. (In part due to Amazon’s desire to be the One and Only.) The more we spend in our home communities, though, the stronger, the better those communities become. Spending cash in those places when you can also accomplishes the same thing because that money stays in the community rather than being siphoned off by the big banks and their partners as ‘fees’ for processing.

I’m not big into audiobooks and don’t have Audible, but my local library has resources for that if I feel the need.  I’ll use a local shop for used books (or biblio.com) instead of Abebooks, too. Just in case you don’t know, Amazon owns both Audible and Abebooks so I’ll avoid them as much as I can, too.

Of course this doesn’t work for everyone and I recognize that. But because it does for me, I’m switching as much as I can away from a juggernaut of loss leaders and convenience to the community I live in. If I and a few others start spending more locally, maybe things will get better. Certainly, I’ll be more engaged with it by being more out in it.

Blast off.WRITING ABOUT SCIENCE FICTION

I’ve been reading a lot of blogs and various ‘news’ pieces about science fiction and most of them amount to very light opinion pieces that are more like pregnant social media posts than actual thinking about the genre. As a consumer of science fiction in all its forms, I enjoy light opinion pieces as much as deeper thoughts. So I’m writing this from a place of love for the genre and love for those who create everything in and around it. I’m not calling anyone out.

Now, with my metaphorical editor hat on, let’s explore what my consumer half would like to see more of when bloggers write about science fiction. 

It always amuses me to see new writing about concepts like the multiverse and note the author’s reference is no more than twenty years old and rooted in first experiences with the concept are less than five years old. The idea of multiple universes has been around for quite a long time, long enough to say that it’s not really new any more. Perhaps it’s just being a middle-aged white man in the world now, and I know that writers fall out of favor (and out of print) along the path to the future, but contributions to the genre shouldn’t be overlooked or forgotten. In fifty years, will the current batch of multiverse stories still be remembered by anyone except those that experienced them in the moment? History says likely not.

But let’s explore how a writer could embrace that history in their discussion of the concept. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction gives a reasonable history of the term ‘multiverse’ and – via The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction – one can find a timeline of references to the term throughout the genre. Additionally, just visiting a better-known resource such as Wikipedia will give anyone writing about the concept some context. I mean, this is the low-hanging fruit but even doing a scholarly search through Google yields easily accessible thoughts on the concept from respected sources such as Scientific American.

Science fiction is a genre of ideas and dialogue, of looking forward from today and extrapolating what the future might hold, of remembering the past and striving not to repeat it. Taking it seriously when writing about the genre should be an implied imperative. Not that the genre is always serious, but writing about it should be unless the intent is to be comic. 

What this consumer (and editor if the hat is still on) wants is intelligent dialogue about the subject of science fiction. Discussion is what we have now, the one way cry of someone begging to be heard on the subject of their favorite things about that subject. What I want to see is more thoughtful musing on aspects of science fiction and what it means to the writer, inviting others to agree or disagree in the same thoughtful way.

(I know, I know. It’s the Internet and I’m asking for a unicorn. I can dream, can’t I?)

So hit me up with some serious writing on the subject of science fiction and share your thoughts, if you’re so inclined. Links in the comments to quality dialogue on the subject are appreciated.

CONSOMMÉ

Damn, the new album from The Cure – the first in 16 years? – is the heaviest thing I’ve heard in a long, long time. It’s so dark and a fine companion to, as others have said, David Bowie’s final album Blackstar. I mean, wow. WOW. Songs Of a Lost World is an amazing record and I wish it was a bit longer, but I’m glad to have it to listen to and absorb.

Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions has arrived at my home (via my local bookstore) and I’m exploring it a bit at a time. It’s taken decades to get here and I want to savor it.

Finally, I’ll reaffirm that I’m all in with Harley Quinn’s and Poison Ivy’s romance on the Harley Quinn cartoon. And when I read Poison Ivy in comics I hear Lake Bell’s voice.

ASSERTIONThe Magic 8-Ball sees you.AT CAPACITY

Wow, that was a lot. Am I procrastinating writing Masque? Maybe a little. (And it’s not like I’m not writing. I’ve been writing a lot on Masque – I mean five drafts now is a lot of words. Isn’t it?) But I digress.

I’m passionate about my favorite subjects and I want it to be better. Being that I have no influence in this realm, I’m really just shouting into the void which shrugs and closes itself off. Then that stranger shows up in your living room, wanting to talk about – whatever.

Your vote (like your dollar) counts more at the local level than nationally, but every vote is important. You also don’t have to broadcast who you voted for. Please just vote.

Our resiliency as a society is tested every day now and in sometimes disturbingly innovative ways over the last ten years or so, too. All that stress builds up and exacts a toll. Trusting people is more difficult than ever before but there are still some who can be trusted if only we recognize them. I choose to trust people until they prove I can’t. 

Look, just – be real with each other. Stop trying to one up and garner likes in the process. Do your thing and let others do theirs. Support your friends and let the negative crap slough off like water off a duck. They say authenticity is the coin of the realm. So be yourself, okay? Take a deep breath, take a step back, and disengage whenever you can. Care for yourself and I’ll see you when I see you.

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A stranger walks into the bar where you’re hiding out before confronting the rest of your life. The stranger sits three stools down from you and orders a double whiskey, neat. You return your attention to your drink but the stranger is so out of place you can’t help but glance at them again. They’ve turned toward you, one elbow on the bar, fingers interlaced. “How’s it going?”

Hi. I’m Jason. I know it’s been a while but I’ve written things you might like if you’re into indie science fiction. Thank you for tuning in. If you like what you see here, there’s a link at the bottom of this post where you can subscribe and get these very infrequent updates sent right to your inbox. No pressure.

I don’t know who made this but it’s brilliant and will happily give credit where it’s due.WONDERMENT

It’s October and for the first time in nine years my Kansas City Royals were in the postseason by virtue of winning a wildcard playoff series. If there’s a surprise this season it was that the Royals were there. A small-market baseball team with a payroll that would barely cover only the infield of the New York Yankees should only be a punching bag for the big boys during the regular season. Maybe they serve as a farm team, developing talent that the rich teams will cherry pick when they become free agents. 

The small-market sports teams across America are kind of like indie authors, don’t you think? I mean, yeah, it’s a bit of a stretch, but when you’re in the trenches of writing, revising, editing, and promoting your work it sure feels like you’re a kind of punching bag. (Maybe it’s just me.) 

You know how it is. A lot of us work full-time jobs, have families or family obligations, and we spend free moments trying to pull the stories in our heads out to relieve the pressure. Stealing time on the bus or at lunch, after the spouse and/or kids go to bed, literally any time we can find to put pen to paper or fingers to keys. And that time comes and goes, ebbs and flows, with the tides of our lives, too. 

Which brings me to the update on Masque. Time is a commodity that’s in short supply of late so it’s taking longer to build this draft. If you’re a creative person you know that sometimes things take longer than the last thing you made. It’s really because each project (song, book, film, etc…) is unique and demands different things of the person creating them. Masque is pulling stuff from deep inside me and making this book a bit too personal at times. The first few drafts had too much me in them so I’m pulling all that out and leaving the story bits. 

It’s a process. But things are moving forward if only a thousand words at a time.

When someone asks a creative how long creating takes, there’s no answer that satisfies them. Right? People think everything they consume for entertainment must be easy to make. It’s not, though. Take my Royals, for instance. Nine years to get back to just the postseason. Masque won’t take that long, though. I promise.

ASSERTION

I’m going to try out something here and see if it works for me and those who read. A little bit of encouragement that I found useful on social media. Sometimes we get too deep in our heads and we forget why we started. One of the things I encourage in writers I meet is to not give up. Maybe the thing you’re working on isn’t the thing that’s going to make you famous or even sort-of well-known but that’s not its purpose. The purpose of creating things is to learn from them and apply the lessons on the next thing. 

So, that in mind, here are a couple of affirmations I came across recently:

drsheenahoward on Threads: Don’t stop creating just because the world doesn’t understand you yet.

purplee.skye on Threads: Dear Authors: You’re currently writing someone’s favorite book. Please don’t give up Authors of Threads

CONSOMMÉ 

 The only current show that’s really got my attention is The Penguin on max. While I’ve never been a huge fan of the character in the comics but Colin Farrell disappearing so completely into the part in The Batman intrigued me. Farrell’s performances of late (Banshees of Inisherin as well as Sugar) have been terrific and so far he’s not disappointed here. The thing I really like about the series is that it feels like a Jeph Loeb/Tim Sale comic from back in the day. It’s Gotham City the way it should be, the way it needs to be for a Batman to exist. 

Plus, everyone is justifiably talking about how great Cristin Milioti is. “Cent’Anni” is a kind of coming out party for her, but it works so well because of her performance leading up to it. Villains get the best stories, and Sofia Falcone here is getting excellent treatment in a top-notch show. Plus now we get Theo Rossi, whose work I’ve always enjoyed.

Matt Wagner’s latest Grendel arc just concluded and there’s a massive twist at the end of Devil’s Crucible – Defiance #4 that pays off decades of Grendel stories. It’s too bad the tv show didn’t take off but the comics have been consistent and provocative in the best ways. If you’ve never read them, I recommend checking if you library has copies of the Grendel Archives. The only thing missing from them is the crossovers with Batman. Hopefully there’ll be a reprint of those books in the near future.

AT CAPACITY

I’ve met some strangers in my time. Haven’t we all, though? Some of them turn out to be really interesting people and if you’re lucky, they become friends. Now I do love to mix with people from time to time, especially in my day job, but it’s exhausting. I can appear to be extroverted but that’s not my nature. 

A good day at a show and a good day at my day job* – for me – are pretty much the same thing. I’ve enjoyed talking with people I know and with people I’ve just met. We’ve connected in various ways and there’s a lot of positive charge in the air. I’m pumped and want to enjoy the feeling. And when the high recedes, as it always does, I’m left needing to recenter myself. So doing some mindfulness exercises helps, and spending time being grounded again by my everyday relationships with my wife and close friends. It’s all about perspective. 

So recognize what works for you, good and bad. Know that the highs go away and hopefully the lows do, too. This extrovert needs to introvert after each big day. Your mileage may vary.

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See you when I see you.

*I’m very, very lucky that I enjoy my day job and I’m pretty good at it.