They never taste who always drink;
They always talk who never think.
Matthew Prior
Month: September 2025
Tom’s World – 25SEP2025 – Bloop
I like this one too, it’s about 1/100 of a second before the 1st shot.
Time and events exists on all scales, from Panck time roughly 5×10^-44th sec up to 10’s of billions of years or roughly 3×10^17th sec. We just happen to exist such that we observe events in our very narrow band of that scale.
Another Psycho-Killer, Another Book Lesson
Another day, another psycho leftist shooter. As I said the other day, be prepared for an almost endless sequence of these suicidal people. Their lives are a misery to them so they want the rest of us to suffer too. Only in addition to everything else that was wrong with this guy he even failed to accomplish what he set out to do. He wanted to kill ICE agents and instead he killed and wounded illegal alien detainees that were in an ICE van. Now that level of incompetence and stupidity really does deserve the Darwin Award. And right there with the shooter’s idiocy, the Left is trying, once again, and to no effect, to question whether the shooter was a Leftist. Well, give it a day or two and they’ll settle for, “He wasn’t a card-carrying member of a terrorist left-wing organization, which is another way of saying these organizations don’t have cards. Their badges are the crazed looks on their faces and the social media memes and buzzwords of the left.
Well, enough of that.
Some of the results from the beta-readers of my novel are coming in and the consensus is that this guy photog must be out of his mind if he thinks anyone is gonna read his awful book. As reader after reader disparaged its characters, plots and even adverbs I was like a cornered wild animal looking for some way to escape the tsunami of negative results. I yelled, “Nooooooooooo!!!!!!!!” Well, maybe there weren’t that many exclamation points in real life. But I was pretty busted up. So, I took a bottle of Tylenol and washed it down with a gallon of grape Hawaiian Punch and pretty soon I was really sick. But that took my mind off my book problems while I headed to urgent care. Now that I’ve mostly recovered, I’m happily in denial and working on an alternate reality where I’ve sold more books than James Patterson and am twice as handsome as Brad Pitt but somehow it turned out backwards. I’m unfortunately, twice as handsome as James Patterson and have sold more books than Brad Pitt. You know it really is important to work these things out ahead of time.
I have an appointment to talk with a marketer who specializes in self-published books and I’m trying to put together a list of questions to ask. At the moment all that comes to mind is, “How can I become fabulously wealthy from my book without putting in any effort at all?” And I think I’ve nailed it. That is exactly what I want an answer to. But I have this nagging suspicion that there may be more to it than that. I seem to be confusing marketer with the genie from Aladdin. Well, you can hardly blame me. Both of them are in my mind, mythical creatures with supernatural powers. But seriously, this whole book thing has been an interesting experience. I’ve learned that writing is a craft that requires lots of work and especially in the planning stages. Writing a story by the seat of your pants seems more intuitive and natural to me but I now understand that building the story ahead of time saves time at the end when re-writing is extremely painful and maybe impractical. Well, the journey continues.
25SEP2025 – Photo of the Day
25SEP2025 – Quote of the Day
For hope is but the dream of those that wake.
Matthew Prior
Guest Contributor – Chemist – 24SEP2024 – Death of SF Magazines
I have always enjoyed the shot story format. For a while, in the 60s & 70s, some of the big name authors were competing with each other to write a complete story on the back of a picture postcard. Some of these were amazingly good!
As for Analog, I gave up on it a long time ago (30 years?). Their Science Fact articles were all doom and gloom:
“We are all going to die and thee is nothing you can do about it!”
Or:
“Here is why FTL travel, Nuclear fusion, laser defenses, etc. won’t work and cannot work.”
And, to me, the Fiction was woke before woke was a thing. So I stopped buying after I realized I had a years worth of issues that I had not read and could not motivate myself to read.
I suspect that Analog (and maybe the others) got infected by the same liberal women who took over the NY publishing houses.
Another datapoint: I recall talking to a successful SciFi author in the 80s who switched from writing short stories to novels. When asked why, he said: “Its just as hard to sell a short story as a novel, but novels pay a hell of a lot better.”
BTW, Photog, another non-woke publishing house is Chris Kennedy Publishing.
You might consider sending him a copy of your novel.
https://chriskennedypublishing.com/
Just Something that Came to Mind
Lately there have been a lot more options if I wanted to talk about what’s in the news. There’s all kinds of Jimmy Kimmel talk. He’s off the air, he’s back on, he’s gonna apologize, his show won’t be carried in a quarter of the country, blah, blah, blah. And Donald Trump just got through trashing Joe Biden and the UN in front of the General Assembly. There are psychopaths shooting up innocent victims everywhere you look and Democrats are desperately kowtowing to Mamdani hoping he can provide the magic bullet needed to bring back the millions of voters who are jumping ship. Yep, there’s all kinds of madness everywhere you look.
But I can use a break from it from time to time. I just get fed up with the awfulness of the world and the awful people doing awful things.
So, let’s talk about something less depressing and maybe more interesting. A while ago I mentioned I bought a copy of a book I owned back in the stone age. It’s an anthology of science fiction stories published in the 1950s, edited by Robert Heinlein, called, “Tomorrow, The Stars.” There are fourteen short stories in the book’s two hundred and forty-nine pages. They’re all between ten and twenty pages long and were written by authors “famous and less well known” at the time. Interestingly, one of the less well-known authors was a certain, “Kurt Vonnegut Jr.”
So, I’ve been rereading these stories, some for the first time in over fifty years. I won’t pretend that they’re all equally good or that any of them are timeless prose. They’re not. They’re pulp fiction or maybe slightly better than pulp fiction. But they’re also entertaining. They amuse. They keep the reader’s interest. They tell a story. All that good stuff. But what’s my point? I’ve read lately that science fiction short stories are an unsellable product. All the magazines and the anthologies are going bankrupt. No one will buy them.
Back in the dark ages magazines like Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction made plenty of money selling monthly editions filled with mostly just short stories. Sure, they would also serialize some novels but mostly we were reading short stories by authors, “famous and less well known.” Now I am well aware we are living in a new age. Theft of intellectual property has been the downfall of all the formerly lucrative entertainment forms. CDs, DVDs and books have been pirated out of existence. Young people have been conditioned not to pay for anything. Everything is a streaming service. Amazon sells books by the penny/a page method.
Yes, yes. I get all that. But these are just the technical details of our age. Piracy has always been around. What it takes to sell a product in the face of these kinds of obstacles is the same thing that is needed in any other place and time; creativity and psychology. And in fact, a short story would seem to me to be the easier sell. You can read (or hear) a short story in a car ride or a subway commute or a high school class that you don’t want to listen to.
Sometimes you don’t want a four-hundred-page epic fantasy. Sometimes you don’t even want a novella. Sometimes you want a ten-to-twenty-page story to take you out of your life for a half hour.
Just something that came to mind.
24SEP2025 – Quote of the Day
Who breathes must suffer, and who thinks must mourn;
And he alone is bless’d who ne’er was born.
Matthew Prior
24SEP2025 – Photo of the Day
The Asphalt Jungle (1950) – A Movie Review
The Asphalt Jungle is a heist film noir co-written and directed by John Huston. It stars Sterling Hayden, James Whitmore, Louis Calhern and Sam Jaffe with a supporting role for Marilyn Monroe. Sam Jaffe plays “Doc,” a criminal mastermind who was recently released from prison and is now recruiting a team to steal a million dollars-worth of gem stones from the safe of an upscale jewelry business in the unnamed mid-western city in which the story takes place. Local racket boss Cobby points Doc to Alonzo Emmerich (played by Louis Calhern) as the fixer who can finance the caper and line up the fences to sell the jewels. He also finds him a getaway driver (James Whitmore as Gus Minissi), a safe cracker (Anthony Caruso as Louis Ciavelli) and a “hooligan” (Sterling Hayden as Dix Handley).
(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)
As the team assembles Doc privately discusses with Dix his distrust of Emmerich and tells him that he will depend on Dix to protect the loot in case Emmerich attempts to double-cross them. There is a subplot around a dirty cop; Lt. Ditrich who receives protection money from Cobby but is being pressured by the police commissioner to find Doc. And we learn more about Emmerich’s personal life and his problems. Emmerich has an aging bed-ridden wife and a young beautiful girlfriend; Angela Finlay (Marilyn Monrie) that he keeps in a love nest downtown. And maybe not coincidentally he’s broke and can’t fund the heist. But his associate Bob Brannom; a hard-boiled private detective who doesn’t see crime as an obstacle to making money, talks Cobby into fronting the heist expenses and throws in with Emmerich in a plan to steal the jewels and leave the heist team out in the cold.
At this point we watch the team in action. And it’s like clockwork. Right up until the point when the nitroglycerin blows the door off the safe. Somehow the blast triggers an alarm at a bank down the block from the jewelry store. And when the security guard shows up at the back door Dix flattens him with one punch to the jaw. But his gun flies out of his hand hits the ground, discharges and shoots Louis Ciavelli in the gut. Gus takes Louis home and tries to get a doctor who will keep his mouth shut about the gunshot wound while helping his friend. Meanwhile Doc and Dix show up at Emmerich’s to transfer the loot and get their cut. But when Brannom sticks them up Dix shoots it out with him. Dix is wounded in the side and Brannom ends up dead. Doc convinces Emmerich to fix his mistake by using his legitimate connections to work a deal with the insurance company to get $250,000 in return for the return of the jewels.
Meanwhile the police have offered a reward for the capture of Doc whom they assume is responsible for the theft. A witness comes forward saying that Doc had been seen entering Cobby’s gambling house and Lt. Ditrich is given an ultimatum to find Doc. Ditrich slaps Cobby around until he confesses and gives up everyone involved in the heist.
The police go to arrest Emmerich and he shoots himself to death rather than go to jail. They arrest Gus and go looking for Louis but he has already died of his wounds. Dix has a girlfriend Doll who hides him and Doc while the police search the city for them. Doc decides to head out on his own and catches a cab that will take him to Cincinnati. But stopping off at a café he indulges in watching a young woman dance provocatively to a jazz tune a little too long and a couple of state troopers recognize him and arrest him. Dix and Doll drive out of town, heading for Dix’s boyhood home in Kentucky. But Dix has been slowly succumbing to his gunshot wound and just as he reaches the farm his family used to own, he collapses and dies.
This sounds like a pretty wild story and it is. But it’s very well done. Jaffe, Hayden, Whitmore and Calhern do a splendid job portraying their characters and selling the plot. And even the secondary characters like Monroe and Caruso are very strong and provide an entertaining atmosphere for this noir. I may be biased but I’ve always thought this was one of the best crime dramas ever made. And this was done in the days when the Hays Code limited the amount of violence that could be displayed in a motion picture and when special effects were basically non-existent. I would say this movie gets my highest rating for fans of crime and noir films.