Patreonage

I’ve finally broken down and put together a Patreon page. It’s just a beginning — I don’t know exactly what to do yet…so I’m offering a story or a piece of a wip each week, plus access to music that then public won’t see for a while and the opportunity to have me write something from your story prompt.
Just part of an overall effort to organize and focus. I’d welcome participation and suggestions. Thanks for reading!

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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.

Strumpet

Strumpet — That’s the name of the first track for my 2017 RPM Challenge cd. You can listen to the 320k version at the site or the 128k version here. Feel free to tell me what you think. It’s a bit of a departure for me as it has absolutely no guitar on it, being a bent sort of piano jazz with a swing to it and some trumpety nonsense. I’m at RPM as Doctor D because their site is stupid and wouldn’t allow me to do it as ‘moderan’, like I’ve done the other four or five times I met the challenge. Most of this is live. The bass part is played by my trusty Dean Playmate, the keys are my pos Casio, the drums are midi re-voiced, and the horns are a mix of techniques.

Madness

I got a little bit exercised today by this article, about the “8 Tribes of Sci Fi.”
Rubbish, absolute rubbish. An ill-considered word salad.

To start with, it considers “sci-fi” which I consider to be the z-movie mentality that pervades tv and pop movies. And it calls the wrong things “sci-fi”. The article might fare better if it were said to be talking about “fantasy”, the umbrella term for science fiction and other related imaginative fields, or about “speculative fiction”, a higher-brow way of saying the same thing.

Read the thing for yourself. Feel free to regale me with your version. Or not.

Method

Though I conduct my fictional affairs with a good bit of handwavium and a helping of deus ex machina, because that’s the nature of the beast, still, I’ve railed against such use in the past. And I was probably right, then.

Context.

Heh. Yeah, right, you say, and rightly so.

But boundaries, fuck ’em. I was wrong, plus it’s addictive…to be unleashed, to not worry about what hard-sf fans are gonna say, or what plot twist came straight out of tvtropes. To just tell the story as it occurs to you. Er, me. Because pov.

That’s a fun plaything, too. Perspective.

Just tell the damn story. I was good at that when I was young. I would just write until I was done. Wrote a 67,000 word novel in one day, on notebook paper, in pencil(s), longhand. It was awful. Only three people have even read part of it. They’re all on Facebook. *ducks*

Tinfoil Baseball Cap

As usual, we’ll cover a lot of subjects with a too-small, too-thin blanket. But cover them we will.
Firstly…Saturday night, for a little while, my one-man internet band moderan was the #1 band in Tucson/Rock, according to data from music-posting site Reverbnation. I’m sitting at #2 right now.

It was pretty easy to get there, and the maneuver was mostly pre-planned. I embarked on a series of cover tunes, some of which I’ve actually registered. Eventually I’ll register them all, but they’re about 20 bucks each, and I plan to do a LOT of them. Cuz they’re fun. I have a system for producing them quickly, based on midi drums and the forty or so years I’ve spent playing those songs, off and on. The music ranges from pop tunes like Killing Me Softly through progrock epics such as Dance On a Volcano.

I sing, play all of the guitars and basses (with a couple of notable exceptions for collaborators), most of the keyboards, some of the strings, and arrange and produce the tracks. The drums are fashioned from midi tracks, which means faithful timing. I seldom monkey with the structures, though I add or change instrumentation.

You can listen here:

With Folded Brain

Shit. I forgot to talk about the King in Yellow stuff. I’ll get back to it by and by. I WILL BLOG EVERY DAY. I WILL BLOG EVERY DAY. I WILL BLOG EVERY DAY.I promise. Or something like that.
It’s effectively New Year’s Day. let’s just go with that polite fiction, and on to the content…

Again and again

I’m trying once again to get myself to blog more often. I don’t know why I don’t…I write every day, copiously. This time I’m planning/hoping to write here every day that my “column” doesn’t appear. So Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday.

It isn’t like there is a lack of things to write about. So…I’ll give it a try.

Progress report: The Cub Tracks thing seems to be going well. People comment on the posts, nobody yells at me, I’m allowed to continue doing it. Those are definite pluses in my world. The link is to the most recent article as of this posting.

Gear and progress

Ok, so I’ll do this in reverse order of the title. Progress and gear rolls clunky. Gear and progress flows. Onward.
For those of you who might be interested, here’s my fx chain (and the best pictures I could find of each):
Yes, I’m a little old-school. I don’t care that much for digital fx, though I have some on my Line 6.

The Arion is my favorite pedal. I would definitely have to comb the net for another if it ever went the way of my DOD FX7. Tremendous tone and considerable fattening complement my budget equipment.

Moody Blue Tuesday

Ross Lockhart noticed my review of “Chick Bassist” and was kind enough to put up a shoutout on Facebook. Good guy, Ross. Fine writer. I have the two Books of Cthulhu that he edited and am going to embark on that adventure soon. But first I need to finish the books ahead in the queue…

Yesterday, while waiting for cabs, I read through Dennis Etchison’s Bradbury/Matheson. I had this to say initially:
Bradbury/Matheson by Dennis Etchison

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

EXCELLENT pair of interviews with titans of weird fiction. The Matheson portion is much longer and deeper but both are illustrative of the men’s personalities and approaches.
The interviewer wisely chooses to interject little of his own personality into the proceedings, instead letting his subjects speak for themselves.
A good deal of the content concerns both authors relationships with Hollywood. Very interesting indeed.

View all my reviews

 

That’s it in a nutshell. Ray bitched through most of the thing, though not without a sense of humor. Matheson got nostalgic, after a fashion. He spent much more time in Tinseltown than Bradbury, and knows the lay of the land better.

Before I left for my appointment with catheter doom, I had a small epiphany and tied together the parts of an epic I’ve had knocking around for a couple of years, entitled Cassilda and the King (<click to listen-a new tab will open). The King, of course, in this case, is the infamous Chambers-created KIY, the veritable wearer of the pallid mask his ownself.