Drilling a little deeper down

Exploring the cord-cutting experience a little more:

The Sling Channel…a caveat. Your seven-day trial starts the moment you open it. Explore online first. I got a surprise 39.98 charge today. I mulled calling to bitch about that, but I’m gonna let it ride and check it out for a month. I’ve already changed the lineup some so I get more of the stuff I actually watch for five bucks less…if I’m not pleased I’ll explore DirecTv Now next month (it has my precious MLB Network and none of those wonderful two-year contracts that DTV is so notorious for).

All of the horror channels have the same movies, give or take one or two. But there’s no penalty for keeping them in the event that they have something that Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, or Shudder (or ScreamBox — I’m trying that, maybe, next month. I wouldn’t mind keeping both if they have enough unique content, at 3.00/month each) don’t have. Same for the other ‘category’ channels. They all have the same four commercials repeated endlessly…

Advertisement

Despondent saith not

I gave up blogging in favor of Facebook posting years ago, but I’ve come full circle and am back to blogging instead. This form has a little more permanence, I think, and if I’m gonna be ignored, I may as well own it.

Though my first published story was in 1977, I’ve been a full-time writer for just a couple of years. I attempted to go full-time just after coming hope from the illness that caused my disability, with a big backlog of material that I fondly imagined was ‘good enough’ and a lot of ‘belief’.

Didn’t work out that way — one, I didn’t have the energy or stamina I had been used to and couldn’t maintain that schedule, and two, the material desperately needed reworking — which I’m still doing, six years later.

Hard to keep going in the face of such massive apathy. I haven’t written anything that has galvanized people into talking about it for years, though that doesn’t stop stuff from getting pirated. I’ve sold more than 5000 kindle-copies of my chapbook, mostly through direct sales. But I have four reviews on Goodreads/Amazon.

Gotta trust in the process though. I know my stuff is good enough. No editor has ever returned a piece saying “This really sucks.” Instead, “this really doesn’t fit what we’re trying to accomplish here. But good luck with this story. I’m sure you can sell it — somewhere else” is the common response.

I resist comparisons…and some of this is sour grapes probably, but I see people whose work isn’t real good selling consistently, and it chaps my ass. But I’m a middle-aged white male, and I guess I should just get used to being marginal. Isn’t like my imagination is inclined to the mainstream.

And I’m not gonna stop, though it gives me pause (and yeah, there are times when I want to stop because working in a vacuum sucks). Friends and even some objective critics have told me they enjoy the work…it’s just that it doesn’t reach enough people. And I don’t know how to get that to happen, other than to keep throwing spaghetti.

I’m not alone. There are lots of us pasta-throwers.

But I ask you — if you’ve read a thing of mine, how about some feedback? Just “I liked it” would be fine. I think you have to write a couple more words than that, but it doesn’t have to be in-depth…that’s the point. People who write for themselves rarely try to get public.

Yeah. I’m having a minor crisis. Not ‘impostor syndrome’, but ‘invisible man’ syndrome…brought on by lack of success of worthwhile material. Help a brother out if you can.

Thanks for reading.

Lately it occurs to me

OprahBros are just recycled BernieBros. I can’t believe that people take that stuff seriously. But apparently they do.

“You’re in the Cabinet! You’re in the Cabinet! And You’re in the Cabinet!”

Ugh. Thanks, Jill. Some images that brings up.

Stuff I did recently:

Reviewed:
The Croning by Laird Barron

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Look, this is effing great. It starts out like a standard matriarchal triumph thing, with the weird witchy wife trope happening and the half-the-man-I-used-to-be protagonist. So it has that ring of familiarity, and those changes are adroitly rung by the author, who then turns everything sideways as he goes cosmic Hidden allofasudden and everything gets the worm’s-eye-view gone slaunchwise until the literally mind-expanding climax.
Killer stuff. It should be a movie. It’d be a million times better than The Void. I’d watch it 167 times. This is my 3rd read-through. I own the tpb and the ebook.

View all my reviews

Edited:

Test Patterns

Instagram (mostly cats)

RIP Edgar.

The Furking Leer

Gillian’s Marsh by Michael Faun

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Blood in the water, blood in the land. Southern Gothic crossed with B-Movie, like John Farris and Flannery O’Connor wrote a script to be directed by Jim and Artie Mitchell. Lurid and mesmerizing, festooned with horrors taken for granted flowing into each other like water under the mangrove trees overhung with Spanish moss in little old New Alabama…the narrator’s camera eye does not shrink from depicting each gross and engrossing incident in this catalogue of terror.
It’s just past the Civil War in the American south. Luann Lee escapes the preacher only to be “rescued” by Red, who should probably be played by Rory Calhoun if you can’t get Kurtwood Smith, in the movie, when someone like Brian Yuzna or Stuart Gordon directs it.
I can just imagine Red’s face, with a furking leer on it and the blood running from his mouth. Michael Faun depicts him so expertly, draws the environment so clearly, evokes crawling horror so well, that you’ll never get the taste out of your mouth.

View all my reviews

Highly recommended. Also recommended-Drugula, by the same author.

Sea of Ash

The Sea of Ash
The Sea of Ash by Scott Thomas

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Zounds! I’ve had this slim novel for quite some time (referring to the Kindle edition). It has languished in my to-read queue for an unconscionable period…but at long last I’ve given it a couple of reads, two weeks apart, and have survived to tell the story.
Reading, I was minded so much of Wells that I hd to keep checking the authorship. The Crystal Egg and the Time Machine came repeatedly to mind-the former because of the style and the latter because of a quaintly Victorian device that figures in the narrative. But Wells didn’t go in so much for the supernatural.
MR James, Walter de la Mare, those would be perhaps more suitable names to conjure with, trying to encapsulate or compare the style and subject matter of this most singular work.
Not that comparison comes anywhere close to capturing the essence of the piece, but I feel compelled to try.
There is that of the ghostly(Fractured Harry himself and several other apparitions appear), and that of the steampunk (the general Victorian air and appurtenances), and that of the strictly naturalistic, all bundled together loosely and interdependent upon one another to form the whole of the structure, like one of Clive Barker’s Cities in the Hills, or a Wicker Man.
The work deserves every accolade that comes to it. I’ve seldom beheld such a work of the imagination in a long career of reading fantastical fiction.
I just bought a copy of the Sea of Flesh and the Sea of Ash, to have the original work(s) together.
Five stars plus.

View all my reviews