RPM and Reverbnation Updates 2/20

New tunes up at RPM Challenge 2017. Just about up to the minimum chronic requirements, and have enough music as well 😛

Also one of the RPM tunes morphed into a jazz-rock number, a little reminiscent of maybe Vanilla Fudge with a little Cipollina and a little Jimi thrown into the hopper.

Advertisement

Well…

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.

Fund and Games

As an independent publisher, one of my chief joys and major headaches is in manufacturing or locating art appropriate for my books. I’ve been fortunate and have found talented artists who can and will create astonishing visuals for my front/back covers.
I combed through deviantart first, but nobody ever responded to contact attempts. Did some of my own art/covers, but I’d like to gain exposure for some people along with myself.
So I started looking at semiprofessionals and professionals. The issue is that people like that like to be paid, and I’m on the Federal tit. I write for pocket money.
Low overhead…bang for the buck.

Conundrum.
But it turns out to be okay. I just can’t front the money. The costs will be recouped fairly quickly-for example, 25 copies of Fear and Loathing In Innsmouth (@9.99 each) will pay the overhead.

So….raise the money.

The successful campaign to raise the funds for hosting/consulting for Letters from Outside now folds in to the Duane’s Books campaign. I’ve added a couple of cool incentives, to wit: free ebooks and autographed copies of books.
I’ve already paid artists Candra Hope and JB Lee for their outstanding work. Ian Sidlow was generous enough to donate a photograph for another cover, for a book that isn’t listed on the publication schedule for the campaign. (Surprises!) Killer stylists Will Jacques and Ryan Case remain to be paid. I’m still looking for one more piece, and I’ve made/am making the rest of the material, plus promo videos, audio versions, and other gizmos and gimcracks.
Whatever I can’t do myself will be crowdfunded, and others will be able to win too. That seems the best way to go about things, to me.

 

Encapsulated

I finished a book last night and a piece of music this morning. Here’s the review of the book:

From Goodreads:

The HAB Theory by Allan W. Eckert

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Finally getting to the end of the Hab Theory. It’s a long book, and the end honestly plods a little bit. It’s a bit anachronistic, in the mode of Arthur Hailey and that bunch.
Not a bad book but not a GREAT book, which is what it wanted to be. A bestselling topper to such things as 334 and The Sheep Look Up, with a new twist on the global disaster thing.
But too much focus on developing sorta stereotype characters made me picture everyone wearing dacron polyester and hoping there would be fondue.

Carnival Knowledge

Note:

It’s been decided by the powers-that-be (namely me) that my December ebook will be Fear and Loathing In Innsmouth. January will be the “abed chronicles”, depicting my harrowing experiences in the hospital a couple of years ago. And perhaps CrazyTown if all of the i’s have been crossed and the tees dotted.
Letters from Outside will fit in there somewhere, as long as I’m in finishing mode. Not going to open it for contributions at present but that’s still a possibility somewhere down the line.
Other volumes due in 2015 include “Milk“, the medical satire (Space Merchants meets Bug Jack Barron); Blue Easter (at long last); and Fallen Earring (the Hendrix novel).

How Those Famous Guitar Players Got Really Good

Yesterday, “Brook” got her birthday present a week early-a 1/2 size hot pink acoustic guitar:She has been practicing. She now knows Em, E, D, Dm, and has made inroads toward making G and A ring. This morning I showed her the blues scale and a minor pentatonic scale, and we discussed how improvisation is done and how songs are put together. Once she has the G and A down, I’ll introduce C and F and we’ll start building a repertoire for her.
Purple Haze and Nights in White Satin will be the first ones. We’ll also work on composing our own material, augmented by the dozen or so percussive gizmos I have lying around.

The world’s newest guitarist will have plenty of additional time to practice. She’s grounded again. Can’t spend five minutes outside without forgetting about the simple ground rules. “Stay in earshot” “Don’t go over to the ghetto-ass kids’ house to play” “Stay out of the parking lot”.
I predict that, at this rate, she’ll be famous by the time she’s 11.
The ghetto-ass kids’ dad is next door working on the cabinetry in the recently-abandoned apartment there. I sincerely hope he heard my lecture.
The littlest one, age seven, who goes by the nickname Yaya, is a yeller. She likes to scream and shout to try to get her way. Faith goes outside and she is told “If you play with my sister, you can’t ride my scooter any more.”
Instead of turning around and saying “Li’l bitch, we gave you that scooter, and your sister is more fun anyway,” Faith gets upset and tears around the complex on a borrowed bike, therefore being out of earshot when I call for her.
Ten minutes later, she drags her scooter into the kitchen and bugs right back out again before I can say anything.
I look out, and she’s on the back of Chi-chi’s (the older sister, all of nine) bike, going around the corner of a building about fifty yards away, in the parking lot.
I slap a tank together and go out the other way, to head them off at the pass, but no. They double back and go back in the ghetto-ass apt.
Sitting on the patio, biding my time. I water the plants and look over the gate periodically.
Eventually herself sees me and comes over.
“Get inside,” I say. “We need to talk. And take that scooter gear (kneepads, elbow pads) off–you won’t need it anymore today.”

The ensuing conversation ended, unfortunately, like so many do, with grounding and a turn in the corner, facing the wall, butthurt. During the course of the dialogue, the phrase “I don’t know” was repeatedly used to justfiy actions taken, as was “I just like to play”. The latter is okay. Not so in-depth, but excusable, depending on the behavior it’s used to represent. But the first is one of the two things that are guaranteed to makes things take a bad turn (the other is to lie to my face and have me catch her).

The child knows this. She is apparently incapable of considering the results of her actions, despite repeated preaching, beseeching, reasoning, back-patting, and other conditioning methods used to reinforce a positive behavior pattern.

She doesn’t like thinking. It makes her head hurt.

It makes my head hurt to think of another ten years of this mindless impulse-following. I’m afraid sometimes her head will just collapse in on itself. Either that, or fill up with cats (who abhor a vacuum, you know).

I’m fairly strict. I expect a lot, I’m told. Too much–I expect literacy and some degree of self-awareness and self-knowledge. I want to see some intellectual curiosity and the ability to tell right from wrong and to act accordingly.

Very little of that going on. So I’m looking at music as the way to get that sort of patience and determination going.

Fingers, eyes, legs, toes crossed. Only can only hope.

blogospherical

Or House of Blog or somesuch.
Here’s the list of creations:
Modblog, the domain version, which won’t be incorporating any of the content from this blog (officially the son of the son of modblog in my private nomenclature). That’ll have the basic daily rants and screeds and fluff, and update posts like this one. I’m committed to daily posting and may well crosspost between the three blogging platforms-blogger, wordpress, and my domain. It depends on how much I have to say each day.
I’m planning at the very least to do a lot more reviews-books and cds more so than movies, which I don’t watch much, and more sports content. Cubs, Bears, Blackhawks specifically. I get a lot of the Cub games on WGN, and the Bears have a few national games. The Hawks are rarely on tv, and the 160 bucks for a season’s worth of streaming is ridiculous. But I digress…next on the list is :

Fallen Earring, the eventual home for the edited first draft of the nanonovel. This version is radically different from the versions previously posted. The delivery system is all that I kept-otherwise it’s a complete rewrite and is causing retrocon ripples throughout my little pocket universe.
You’ll notice that the design is a little different…in that the background is the same gif that I made most of the old buttons from. I think it looks pretty good in that context, and I’ve chopped up the colored-pencil drawing some and used it for a header graphic as well as the “book cover”.

WordWorld, where I’m planning to post a good variety of my written work. That will include the revised versions as well as some first and second drafts as I wish to discuss the genesis of some of the pieces.
The content will change from time to time as I add and subtract pieces, depending on which segment of the overall continuity they’re slotted into at the moment.
The design has my usual starfield background and a bunch of desk tools, including the requisite cuppa joe.

Fear and Loathing In Innsmouth. This webcomic (including a portion that is envisioned as a graphic novel) will be starting around the New Year.
The greenish color scheme indicates the relation to the Letters from Outside anthology, due to start appearing around the same time.

There are also a couple of things I’m not prepared to unveil as yet. It seems that I found the key to my lethargy after all as my O2 converter experienced complete fail at @2 am, causing my dearest to be awakened and the on-call tech to be summoned. It had been sounding like a garbage truck in the driveway for most of the afternoon and night, and finally gave up the ghost.
Fortunately I had one last portable tank on hand and D put that together while I made the call. The whole process was handled very professionally, and Jose was here within the hour to change out the unit. I’d have to say that the old converter was probably failing for a while, and that’s why I was feeling so run-down that I was literally huffing and puffing just from getting up to go into the kitchen. Burning plastic fumes, air instead of straight oxygen, a combination of the two, those are likely culprits.
I’m feeling much better. My gigantic migraine has just about gone away. D has gone to work dspite having just a couple hours’ sleep, though she’s gonna go home early if allowed. Last Friday was pretty slow, or so I was led to understand. Let’s hope today is likewise. We could use the money but she has to be exhausted.

nanostatus and project updates

14,481 words now in the books, as of this morning. Changing the metafictional conceit and making the mc a blogger rather than a vidcaster, and changing the setting to more-or-less present day has made a huge difference in thrust and has gotten me through a long section of infopak and dialogue, simply by breaking it up into digestible chunks.
Making each chapter a blogpost has been a masterstroke as far as the writing. I’m surprised that it took me so long, considering how much I enjoy writing flash fiction. I’d always thought of the novel as a themed-short collection. Now it’s short-shorts, and I don’t plan to apply any Nair as yet.
Was going to do an edit of the first 10k and throw it on here over the weekend, but I don’t think so right now. I’m just going to keep chugging along. Tonight I should finally finish the musical portion of the backtrack to Dereliction of Duty, and it’s entirely possible that I might get the voiceover done as well and get the whole thing wrapped up. I’m pretty mad at myself for taking so long. I think Sam is too, but he’s nice enough not to say so. Will give the project extra attention as a result. Sounds pretty nice so far-Mozart-to-Metallica-in-a-minute.
I have a suspicion as to the cause of my recent lethargy, and we’ll see if that bears fruit (it has to do with my O2 system, which has been sounding funny the last day or so). My unfortunate bout with insomnia continues-I’m still keeping vampire hours and sleeping a couple of hours at a time.

Fallen Earring

I’ve been busying myself during the midnight hours, fooling around with the templates and graphics for my Planet Moderan site, which has been moved to new servers. I’m not going to automatically transfer over the content, as I have some new things I want to try. There’s no real hurry, and I’d like to give those things the best showcase I can.
In the meantime, I’m moving along with my nanonovel Fallen Earring, hovering around 7,000 words for all of the trumpeted fail ( there has to be a certain percentage of anti-fail so that the fail is that much sweeter in this hostile (or merely indifferent universe)).
Yeah…but that fail, that’s a problem. The very concept of fail has so invaded things that it invaded my nanonovel last night and made me write this passage of questionable wisdom:

I’m up all night again. Can’t seem to shake this bout of insomnia, and am just going to have to run with the sleep/fail and hope it ends soon. So tired. Day upon day of two-three hours of sleep at a stretch followed by exhaustion and passing out at the wrong time of day to reset the Circadian rhythms has me disoriented, and it’s all I can do to distractedly type away…

Somehow I managed to record an episode of the show today. I was just watching myself on camera, and I looked like hell. Face all pouchy and dissipated.

The face of fail.

Because that’s what I do. That’s all we do.

Think about it.

Everything you do is ultimately bound to fail. Entropy always wins, in the end.

That isn’t to say we shouldn’t bother to do anything, because doing things helps us to pass the time. But the long view says that everything we accomplish is but the erection of an anthill.

Sometimes it’s comforting to take that objective view, see things from the mountaintop as it were, to take in the big picture.

Because you can get too close to real sometimes too.

Jeeping jeebus! What in the name of Graham Nash was I thinking? I can see it now, Fail and Loathing In Innsmouth is my new title. Hmm. Waitaminnit. Ok, I gotta do something with that.
Onward.
I’m working at Fallen Earring. There are a lot of stops and starts but the story is starting to emerge from the ashes of the previous ten or so outlines. It’s a lot more autobiographical than most of my things, even though the character isn’t modeled after me. But the genesis of a lot of the incidents and happenings in the character’s life occurred in my own. Not much Marty Sue, but the charge might have a smidgeon of barb.
Those sections are turning out to be the easiest to write, which leads me to a conundrum.
I’m what you call a linear writer. The flow of words is so important to me that I write things in consecutive order, the way they’re laid out. It’s only later that I tear that all up and rearrange it.
But I can see where I may be slogging soon. There’s a slower section coming up, and the contemplative bogs me down because, well, I’m me. Much more intuitive than contemplative. I don’t want to improv on it because it’s an important section, but I already know it’s gonna be slow and am tempted to ditch the next three thousand or so words and dig into the warping-reality stuff.
Cuz yeah, reality-warp beats fail. The premise is fruitful and I’m inventing spins already. The metafictional angle (my lead character is a blogger) works, fits my warped sensibilities, helps to subtly impress the storyline. I love researching/remembering/dreaming up the period detail. I just need to get through that passage. And I dipped into it tonight.
The Fallen Earring blog. Just in case you want to visit. You never know when I might pop up a segment.

Chicken and Waffle

Yep. So here it is again, nanotime, when incipient novelization is supposed to be translated into actuality at 1667 words per day. This will be my fourth attempt. I’ve successfully navigated the nanowaters before thrice, but have never had the particular set of challenges I face this time-namely, embarking on a novel without any preliminaries.
I was originally going to work on a delayed project, Vermilion Dawn, set many years after Martian colonization. That novel needs some seed from a previous novel to work properly, though, and much rumination led to deciding upon a “rewrite” of a novel I’ve started several times but haven’t finished, in an attempt to exorcise that ghost once and for all.
So, after much waffling, hemming, and hawing,  I withdrew Vermilion Dawn in favor of Fallen Earring, dragged out my ten thousand docs and links and books and whatnot about Hendrix, and furiously began scribbling, in longhand on notebook paper, my proposed outline. That was the day before Hallowe’en.
The floor in my office became decorated with paper balls not long after that. I spent part of a mostly sleepless night shooting them through a Nerfoop I have hanging next to the door and ruminating about how to make the thing work.
Fallen Earring is a genrehopper, a rule-breaker. An altworld themed-story collection that masquerades as a novel and takes place mostly via flashback. I’ve been working on it on and off for a few years now-the themes and settings of the thing are burned into my brain (like some of my other unwritten or unpublished “works”), and I cannot let them go. The problem is that I hadn’t arrived at the proper method of telling the story.
Still not sure that I have. I’ve gone from third person limited to third omniscient, from present tense to past, to first person, to having different characters tell the story. I’ve tried having Jimi as a character, which doesn’t work at all, having him as the narrator, which really doesn’t work on an extended basis, adding metafictional frameworks, turning the events of the narrative this way and that, trying semi-desperately to find a way, the right way, to GET THE DAMN STORY TOLD.

I think I have it. Now I just need to finish up several other projects so I can get at the thing. And hope against hope that I don’t change my friggin mind again.
My ancient colored-pencil and smeared-marker pic has been pressed into service as the cover. I added some lettering I developed a couple of years ago, did a little photoshop sharpening, and that was that.
Now I just need to do the writing. I’m actually shooting for @75k, as that’s the projected wordcount of the whole thing, and I’m still waffling over whether or not to edit what I do each day and put it up here. Very possible-I’m going to take a look at what I actually have and make that decision.
On other fronts-I’m still waiting for GoDaddy to finish the transfer of my domain to my new webhost so I can get after rebuilding my website. I was hoping that could be done before NaNoWriMo so as not to complicate things any more than they already are, but no go. That’s going to be a cause for more waffling as I try to decide whether to go with a more conventionall website or to make everything wordpress. Very likely that it’ll be some combination of the two like I’ve had before, but I just don’t know. I’m pretty sore about the short shrift I got from GoDaddy and really don’t want to do a whole bunch of coding. That’s all up in the air for now.
I almost chickened out of Nano, but when I was established as the community leader from Writing Forums, I had to buck up and run with the ball. WF recently promoted me to global moderator from my previous position as forum mod. Have to set a good example.