I know, deep subject, joke too-often told. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Last time, I reported that I was going to try to blog on the off-days from creating Cub Tracks. I just skipped a couple of days.
They’ve been busy days. I’m amid one of those spells of productivity that I seem to be cursed with and I’m generating new copy and riffs in bulk. Some of it is even worth keeping.
Here’s todays Cub Tracks (Masters Reality) – link – with the fabulous image:
Ozzy and Sharon “sing” the seventh inning stretch.
I build these articles as little stories. First I prospect for links, in mostly predetermined places, and see what kind of narrative can either be gleaned or imposed on that collection of webpages.
I’m looking for things that either can create discussion by themselves, or that augment previous discussion on other pages on the site, or that continue the prevailing narrative of the fanbase in general.
Right now, the Cubs are the top of the heap. They’ve conquered as much of the baseball world as you can without actually playing the games. So I’m playing off of that.
The rest I pack with in-jokes, subreferences, links to videos, links to sarcastic commentary, whatever works to further the entertainment value of the piece, or to educate and inform. Just discovering how much I can do with the form.
It takes a couple or three hours three days a week to accomplish this all. The process is pretty involved, but I think it’s worth doing things right.
Similarly, I think of my songs as stories, and take the same sort of approach.
Was inspired by a series of exchanges with Joe Pulver, infamous author of many King in Yellow-themed tales and a very knowledgable music fan. It works into the narrative continued in a series of songs and short stories, involving that very King, and tangentially, Brown Jenkin, Nat(e), aka Brown Jenkins, and Jimi Hendrix.
There are four more new tracks at Reverbnation, last week’s total output. And I completed three stories, editing and sending on a few more:
Some of those pieces are available at Shoggoth.net, some will be appearing in anthologies and magazines and ezines, and a heap of them will come out in my books.
I’m waiting to tell the tale of “before Crazytown” second edition until it’s actually out again. Murphy got ahold of that process and turned it over to Kafka.
“The Forgotten God” will be sent off this afternoon. “Sunshine and Scarlet” will be saved for shoggoth.net, as will the other two in that miniseries, and “Bone Sequence”. “Green”, the new version from Crazytown, is in queue somewhere, and “The Whispering Trees” is going to queue up somewhere as well. Unless I create additional pieces, that might delay Crazytown…but there will be plenty to look at.
Fear and Loathing in Innsmouth is complete, ready to go. Once “bC” is resurrected, it’ll be next. Gonna try to get a couple blurbs before I put that out, and then “Betrothed to Yog-Sothoth” is right behind it.
Once the website stuff is all sorted out, Letters from Outside will appear too. Early 2016 sometime.
That’s a good week’s work, I think.
Tomorrow I’ll talk about some of the background for the King in Yellow stuff, with excerpts from the work. Then we’ll get to some book reviews.
RetroGrade A 