Category: My Fiction

Here are my own stories. Science fiction and fantasy mostly but other things may be added too.

The Safety Dance – Part 1

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The man stood alone on the subway platform at ten thirty in the morning and considered where his life was going.  He had just been laid off at the office and now was trying to work out how he was going to break the news to his wife.  She was home with their three small children and the dog and had been hoping that the Christmas bonus he had been expecting today would pay for them to move to an apartment in a nicer town where the schools were decent.

Now all of that was in the wind and he’d have to start looking for a job in a not-so-great economy with a not-so-great resume to sell.  Suddenly getting home seemed like a really bad idea.  He looked behind him at the cardboard box sitting on the bench.  There were some books, a coffee mug, some desk toys and a few papers that his boss had watched him take and which were considered “non-proprietary.”  No company secrets sneaking out the door, not even a Swingline stapler.  Suddenly looking at this pathetic flotsam representing five years of his life, he picked up the box and dumped it in the nearest trash barrel.  The coffee mug made a satisfying tinkling sound as it smashed against the metal barrel.

And just like that he felt considerably better.  He opened up his brief case and started lightening the load.  He got rid of anything he didn’t think would ever be of any use in the afterlife of corporate separation.  Most satisfying, he ripped apart his safety lanyard with its annoying multi-colored slogan about reducing risk to zero.  That seemed the most pathetic part of the corporate culture that he had had to endure at work.  How exactly had the never-ending safety dance protected him from the danger of losing his job.  He had to admit that the culture had saved him from earthquakes, lightning and tornadoes but it had been useless against unemployment.  He stopped for a second when he found the free roast beef card from the company cafeteria.  He had nine out of the ten spots stamped.  He was a week away from the free sandwich.  He had to admit that one burned.  But he chucked it away too.  There was nothing left in the brief case so for good measure he chucked that too.  Now he felt giddy.

He walked up out of the subway station into the cold, bright light of a December morning in Manhattan and thought, “Okay, Odysseus, now what?  Instinctively, he started walking uptown.  By noon he realized he wanted a cup of coffee and a snack so he stopped at a coffee shop and bought a very overpriced coffee and doughnut and sat near the front window and looked out at the city.  He was in the middle of a block that was mostly expensive five story walk-ups.  Remarkably there weren’t any homeless tents on the sidewalk so the illusion of pre-COVID, pre-George Floyd New York was almost perfect.  As he drank his coffee and ate his doughnut a feeling of happiness washed over him.  But when the snack was finished, he realized that it was time to decide how this day would end on a better note.  He needed a path forward.

He took out his phone and looking in his contacts he saw the name of a guy he worked with at the job before this one.  They had been friendly but the somewhat odd personality of this guy had always kept things a little off.  But he had been pretty well connected.  They both were inside-sales guys for large industrial equipment manufacturers and he had heard the guy was doing alright.  So, he called him up and heard, “Jim!  Wow, I haven’t thought about you in a million years.  What’s up?”

“Dave, my boss gave me the boot today.  I’m looking for any leads for something right away.”  The speaker went silent for a few seconds and then, “You know, it’s a damn funny thing.  I know you’re a local boy and never set foot outside the northeast but there’s a very nice opening I just heard of in Missouri that is probably right up your alley.”

Now it was Jim’s turn to go quiet.  Missouri, how the hell was he supposed to move there?  He didn’t know anything about living outside of New York and he didn’t want to try.  But he decided not to shoot it down right away, “Well, I guess I’d like to hear a little more about it.”

Now Dave’s voice sounded a little annoyed, “You know this is a pretty sweet deal.  I wouldn’t wait too long before coming in.  Can you meet for lunch tomorrow?  I’ll bring along the hiring manager and you can impress him with your sparkling wit.”  Deciding quickly, Jim said, “I’ll be there.  Where should we meet?”

…………

Sequential Horror

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Hollywood seems incapable of making anything original and all the sequels and reboots they make suck mightily.  So, I have decided to step into the breach and provide the ultimate in sequel mashup awfulness.

Movie Treatment: Cosmic-Horror-Palooza

Rick Deckard is at home with his wife Rachael having breakfast before he heads off to work as head school crossing guard at the Philip K Dick Elementary School in Portland Oregon.  Rachael is pregnant with their first child and asks Rick to bring her some sweet gherkin pickles on his way home.  She chastises him briefly because this is the third time he’s forgotten.  He absorbs the abuse kisses her on the forehead and heads out the door while absently loading .45 shells into his revolver.

When he reaches the security office, he notices on the various video surveillance screens that a protest has set up shop in the intersection adjacent to the northwest corner of the school.  A mostly crossdressing mob of activists with signs that say REPLICANT-PHOBIA IS HATE were chanting and marching in one of the crosswalks.  This would not be an easy day.

Suddenly an energy bolt blazed across the screen and struck one of the extremely plus-sized blonds-wigged transwomen in spandex and left a visibly gaping hole through his body before collapsing onto the asphalt.  Several other energy bolts followed in quick succession wreaking havoc with the chant as deep bellows and hoarse screams erupted from the targeted activists.

Deckard bolted for the door and sprinted toward the crime scene.  As he approached, he could see that the attack was coming from a tree located fifty yards from the corner.  He approached warily, shielding himself from view with the side of the building and ending up very close to the base of the tree.  Peering carefully around the corner of the building he could see a shimmering patch of foliage that was the source of the deadly beams.  As he watched he could make out what looked like a humanoid form and aiming for the head he unloaded with his .45.

The shimmering patch fell to the ground and Deckard ran over to it.  What he saw there startled him.  A man shaped creature lay on the ground but the inhuman head had insectoid mandibles.  The .45 slugs hadn’t done the head any good but Deckard added a couple more through the cranium just to be sure.  Looking around on the ground he found a long rod with a blinking light at one end and what probably was a trigger near the other end.  Picking it up and sighting through the blinking light device he aimed at the tree and pushed the trigger.  A bright red bolt drilled a two-inch round hole precisely through the 36 inches of the tree trunk and elicited a respectful whistle from the impressed former blade runner.

Looking into the foreground he could see a shimmering area about twenty feet down the sidewalk.  Suddenly four of the humanoid creatures approached with their right arms raised in the universal sign of respect for a successful warrior’s victory.  They came bearing a large blue lawn dart which one of their comrades had claimed as his trophy over a human in a 1968 Cincinnati Ohio suburb.

But before they could bestow this trophy on Deckard, other creatures poured out of the dimensional portal that the four earlier beings had opened.  These creatures were decidedly unlike the first ones.  They were about eight feet tall with extremely elongated heads with two sets of jaws, one inside of the other.  They had long claws on the feet and hands and a long, pointed tail.  Deckard instinctively knew that the saliva dripping from the creatures’ jaws was molecular acid and that this wouldn’t end well.

About twenty of the creatures attacked the four earlier visitors and an enormous battle ensued.  The bug-jawed warriors put up a hell of a fight with their energy weapons and the lawn dart but there were just too many of the xenomorphs (Deckard somehow sensed this was what these other creatures should be called).  Seeing that the battle would soon be over Deckard called his office and ordered his team to lock down the school and call the authorities.  Then he sprinted over to the protest site to warn them away.

Unfortunately, the activists had repurposed the event into a day of rage against transphobic energy-beam wielding haters and they had begun turning over cars and torching them.  They had formed a kind of funeral pyre for their fallen comrades but it hadn’t really done a thorough job of consuming their bodies so a very questionable pile of remains remained.  Seeing Deckard running toward them carrying the energy weapon they assumed he was the killer and they charged toward him.  He stopped and looked around.  Behind him the remaining ten or so xenomorphs were coming up quickly in his direction.  With the two groups converging on his position imminently, he did what any clear-thinking individual would do.  He ran sideways and hoped for the best.

And that worked extraordinarily well for him.  But much less well for the angry mob that suddenly intersected with the xenomorphs.  It turns out xenomorphs are not transphobic.  In fact, it turns out they’re transphilic.  In fact, I think they even enjoyed eating the wigs.  It wasn’t pretty.

Deckard took the opportunity to sneak over to an entrance to the school and punch in the entry code and head for the security office.  When he arrived, his crew updated him on the current state of the “battle.”  The xenomorphs were somewhat leisurely feasting on the four warriors and the fifty some-odd rioters.  Deckard tried in his mind to come up with a strategy to hold off the xenomorphs until Space Marine troops could be summoned.  But nothing occurred to him.  He did remember that he had to get those gherkins for Rachael but that didn’t really seem to improve the situation.

But then a very odd thing happened on the screen.  One of the corpses of the warriors suddenly stood up and metamorphosed into something that was a combination of the xenomorph and a rioter.  It looked like a xenomorph wearing a yellow wig.  But it grew to five times the size of one of the xenomorphs and began eating the other xenomorphs.  And each time it ate one of them it got bigger.  The xenomorphs never ran away and kept fighting but one by one they were swallowed by the shape-shifting creature.  At one point a xenomorph managed to rip an arm off the shapeshifter and throw it to the ground.  The arm sprouted six spider like legs, a mouth full of teeth at the shoulder and proceeded to attack the xenomorph.  Within half an hour the battle was over and the shapeshifter and the walking biting arm coalesced into an amorphous mass of protoplasm.  After a short time, the blob flowed over to the school and covered it in a layer of pulsing goo.

Deckard watched in horror as all the doors began to slowly ooze rivulets of the creature.  He sent his crew to the doors and they used CO2 fire extinguishers to freeze the jelly as it attempted to enter the building.  Things were looking quite bleak as the extinguishers one by one were emptied of their frozen contents.  But suddenly the ooze retreated from the doors and the creature flowed off onto the nearby street and reformed into the shape of a yellow wigged transwoman complete with alarmingly overstretched spandex body suit.  The creature was apparently asleep.  As Deckard watched the sleeping form evaporated completely.  At that point he saw that there was a similarly sized shape on the ground about ten feet from where the sleeping creature had been.

Gathering his courage Deckard walked out of the building and approached the shape on the ground.  When he got near it, he saw that it was what looked like a giant seed pod.  And as he watched it burst open and slowly a living being pushed its way out.  When it had exited the pod, it was seen to be an identical blond wigged transwoman; spandex and all.  Deckard stood his ground, pointed the energy weapon at the creature and asked it to explain what had just happened.

The creature adjusted its costume, scratched at its beard and explained that its species sent spores throughout space that land on planets and produce seed pods that mimic other life forms and then replace them with their own individuals.  And slowly they replace all individuals of the local dominant species and thus take over that world.  However, because of all the various different cell types that were present in this individual’s new body, life on Earth was just too painful for it to continue and it begged Deckard to finish it off as a mercy killing.  And Deckard promptly obliged it using the alien energy rod.  At that point the creature evaporated into the air (except for the spandex suit and wig).

When the police finally showed up, they wanted to know what the hell was going on.  All that remained of the battle were the few burned out cars and the spandex suite and wig.  Deckard started to tell the whole story then thought better of it and just said there had been a protest that sort of got out of control and left it at that.  One of the officers asked him about the energy rod and he said it was a prop for a school play.  The police did a walk around and cited the school for a safety violation because of the empty fire extinguishers and Deckard had to fill out a lot of paperwork and give some of his staff a mental health week off to keep them from quitting.

He didn’t get home that night until ten thirty and when he walked in the door Rachael asked him how his day was.  He said it was okay.  But then she looked at him and said, “You forgot the gherkins!”

So, he turned around and headed off to the grocery store with his walking stick blinking along.  She said after him, “Men are so easily distracted.”

Talk the Talk

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Regular readers of this site know I tend to make fun of H P Lovecraft’s prose style.  In his better written stories, it has a quasi-nineteenth century sound to it.  But in some of his less ably written material it instead just sounds kind of overblown.  But recently I’ve been listening to a YouTube channel called Horror Babble by some guy called Ian Gordon who sounds a little like the actor who played Jay Peterman on Seinfeld.  He provides an accent that, I guess, is supposed to sound like something between 1920’s Oxbridge English and possibly early twentieth century Boston Brahmin.

After listening to a few of these recordings I’ve realized that this presentation makes these stories incalculably more entertaining.  Let me qualify this statement.  It doesn’t make the stories better horror stories.  But the presentation is just more fun.  I think the accent makes the ridiculousness of the stories seem intentional.  It’s camp.

And maybe it works because that’s more or less the “voice” that Lovecraft was hearing in his own head.  It’s always seemed to me that Lovecraft’s work was sort of an homage to Edgar Allan Poe.  And because Lovecraft lived far removed from the era when Poe’s prose was contemporary and because Poe was a consummately better writer Lovecraft’s language always seems stilted.   But with a spoken word interpreter somewhat bridging the gap with his theatrical reading it somehow works pretty well.

Now most of you probably already listen to audio-books.  The only ones I’ve ever listened to were Larry Correia’s Adventures of Tom Stranger with Adam Baldwin providing the voice talent.  And come to think of it the specific voice really does make a big difference in the enjoyment of that story too.

Well, anyway, this little epiphany has got me thinking about the voice that you hear when you write something.  I mean, unless you’re writing a character that’s more or less you, how do you hear that character or characters speaking.  What do they sound like?  Is it a regional accent?  And that’s kind of a big deal.  If all my characters sound exactly like me that might make it hard for my readers to see these characters as real people.  Going back and reading some of my dialog I would say that there are definitely differences in speech for the different characters.  And this is most noticeable for characters that differ in sex, age and generation.  So, I’m not worried that I have to reinvent all of my dialog.

But it does occur to me that maybe I’d like to add some characters that have very flamboyant speech patterns just to give the story some extra zing.  After all, even Shakespeare added dialect characters to make some of the scenes comical or memorable.  His dialect characters were usually Irish or Welsh or Scottish.  I guess I could throw in a Southie from Boston or a South Asian character for good measure.  But if I really want to get exotic, I’ll throw in a Millennial Social Justice Warrior.  Now that’s a foreign language that’ll take some practice.

The Long National Nightmare of Me Being Way Too Busy is Over!

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Today I finished up a weeklong marathon project that really made my life a misery and seriously cut into my on-line time to the detriment of this site.

Whew!!!

So here I am looking around and I see…

The same crap as the week before!

Hmmm.

Okay, there’s a claim that Biden’s poll numbers have gone up a point or maybe two.  Let’s grant that.  But his swing state numbers, both with and without third party candidates are the same or maybe even a little bit worse than before.  And inflation has gotten worse but the disastrous housing market is forcing the Fed to drop interest rates to try and generate some good news for Biden.  Which will make the inflation worse still.

And the Zoomers are really angry about Gaza.

Apparently, the big tent party is beginning to turn on its Jewish contingent because of Biden’s support for the Gaza War.  And this is causing pundits like the Ragin’ Cajun James Carville to hit the panic button.  His exact words were:

“I’ve been very vocal about this,” Carville said. “It’s horrifying, our numbers among younger voters, particularly younger Blacks, younger Latinos … younger people of color. Particularly males. We’re not shedding them, they’re leaving in droves,” he added.”

So, Biden has lots of election problems because the country has lots of problems and it’s too late to fix them before November.

And the border crisis is worse than ever and the criminal aliens are in the news every day.  And the cities are becoming war zones.

And now ships are crashing into bridges and destroying them.  I mean, you can’t make this stuff up!

Sure, this is more of the same.  But it’s like a train crash.  Once you’ve discovered that you have no brakes and you’re closer than some minimum distance “x” then you can’t avoid the crash.  But the closer you get to the impact the more terrifying is the view from the engineer’s seat.  So, I’m sure whoever is running the Biden campaign is in daily contact with the voting officials in Pennsylvania figuring out if they can add an extra five million votes to the Biden total on Election Day.

Well, enough election crap.  Instead something nearer and dearer to my heart; my novel (The American Archipelago: Book 1 – The Sniper).  Thanks to all who’ve been reading along and special thanks to those who have provided feedback.  Honest criticism is extremely valuable when you’re trying to make a story attractive to the publishers and compelling for the readers.

Anyone who has a taste for dystopian science fiction, I ask that you give it a whirl and leave some comments that reflect your take on the story, positive or negative.  And the more specific the better.

Here in Dunwich the weird is the rule and the weather is no exception to this.  It’s supposed to snow tonight and then rain will freeze up tomorrow night and create a Class IV Kill Storm. So tomorrow, after helping Camera Girl navigate the frozen tundra, we’ll probably hunker down and enjoy the sounds of squealing brakes and screeching cries on the road outside as the black ice claims numberless victims on the crater strewn back roads of Dunwich.  Afterward I’ll go out for the traditional gathering of the pocket change from the bodies of the crash victims and I’ll return as a conquering hero (of sorts) as I dole out this largesse to my minions (dog one and dog two) in the form of low-quality pressed rawhide that I purchase on the websites of third world competitors of Amazon dot com.

I’ve often wondered what would happen if a prolonged storm cut off the supply of these “treats.”  I fear that my minions might notice that there is a disturbing similarity between pressed rawhide and, well, me!  Me thinks Dog One has a lean hungry look about him.  Such minions are dangerous.

Well, anyway, enough yammering.  I’m back and on the job.

The Future History of the People’s Revolt

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Writing my sniper story has been an interesting project.  I’ve recently realized that it provides me with a way to escape from the repressive environment that we find ourselves in.  I can imagine a world where people find a way to escape from the Left’s stranglehold on our lives.  Science fiction was often described as escapist fiction; an escape from the real world.  Dreaming of a trip to the Moon or Mars was a highly enjoyable pastime.  I remember as a kid going to the library and taking out the Heinlein juveniles one by one and wishing there were a hundred instead of a dozen or so.  I guess it’s human to dream about a richer or more exciting or a better world.

And when I was a kid, we then got the Apollo program and we really did go to the Moon.  Well, maybe we actually will revolt from the Left.  After all, it’s been done.  The Soviet Union fell.  Communism or Wokeism or whatever anti-freedom regime we find ourselves under is no godlike entity.  It’s just people who crave control over others to enrich themselves.  Surely such an enterprise can be swept away if it ceases to provide the population with a reason to keep it going.

So, I don’t flatter myself that whatever MacGuffin I invent to carry my story forward; whether it be nuclear powered drilling equipment or fusion reactors or giant lasers; has any special rationale for really coming true.  But that’s not really important.  Just as the terra-forming capability that Heinlein’s stories are based on, is completely fictitious and the Earthlike conditions on his Mars and Venus stories are completely erroneous does nothing to ruin the enjoyment that these stories afforded and still allows a fan of these stories to imagine that actual planetary exploration is an exciting and worthwhile human endeavor.  After all, a manned mission to Mars is something being seriously discussed and planned.

So, I plan to write a series of stories in a fictitious future where a band of plucky heroes upset and upend the oligarchs who currently run our world and make a fight out of regaining their freedom.  As with Heinlein’s Future History, not all of the stories may be aligned with each other.  I can always cover up my mistakes by pleading alternate realities in the “multiverse.”  Sure, why not?  If Marvel can have multiple spidermen then why can’t I play fast and loose with the future?

Now I’m not doing anything that isn’t already out in the world.  In about two weeks a movie is opening up called “Civil War.”  And this movie has the United States broken into warring factions and a ground assault on the White House.  So, my stories will be well within the mainstream.  The only difference is that probably this movie and any other movies or “best sellers” that come out will cast the Left as the heroes and the Right as the awful traitors.  Well, that’s alright.  To each his own I always say.

So, thanks, to Uncle Bob Heinlein for his inspiration.  I’m officially in the future prediction business.  But in the words of L. Sprague de Camp “It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.”  So, I better learn to be vague.

What Should Science Fiction Be About?

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There is an endless debate about whether science fiction should be literature or genre fiction.  By that I mean should the story be about the humanity of the characters or about the rocket ships and ray guns.  Now this is an artificial dichotomy.  Even in the pulpiest of space operas, the humanity of the protagonists, even the humanity of the non-humans is always a factor.  But when the story basically becomes “Pride and Prejudice” with only a stray rocket ship thrown in as a fig leaf then we’ve stepped over the line to lit-sf.

A hundred years ago the pulp market said science fiction was about the rocket ships.  And that school of thought dominated during the first half of the twentieth century.  Sometime in the 1960s literary science fiction began.  I’m sure its roots go further back and it as yet was only the beginnings of what it would become, but the earlier dominance of space opera and pulp type stories began to give ground to more sophisticated writing styles and psychological and sociological considerations in the stories.  Women authors and progressives began to address social justice issues.

Sixty years later the pendulum has probably swung as far in the direction of literary science fiction as it can go.  Almost every science fiction publisher employs editors who probably wouldn’t allow a story published that ignored the social justice pieties that define the acceptable mindset of this editorial class.  And these approved stories have not been wildly successful.  In fact trad publishing is in pretty bad shape.  But with the advent of self-publishing the possibility exists for other types of stories to begin circulating again.

But the question still needs to be asked what are the relative sizes of the markets for “literary sf versus stories about rocket ships.  My guess is that if the right kind of rocket ship stories were available, they would garner at least half the market.  I think it’s the case that many of the boys that currently spend most of their time playing video games would be the market for this kind of science fiction.  Currently from what I’ve heard they read a kind of fan fiction that involves stories taking place in the “universe” of the games they like playing.  I assume they aren’t attracted to the literary sf but I could see them being attracted to more adventurous types of stories and these would fit more in line with the kind of pulp/space opera stories that used to make up science fiction.

Of course, it can be done backwards where writers of pulp sf could go to work producing this fan fiction to an already existing game universe.  But to me this seems restrictive.  Having to limit your creative directions according to a video game seems sophomoric.

But in reality, there are markets for all different kinds of stories.  The odd thing is that the traditional publishers and even Amazon act as gatekeepers to limit the types of stories that receive publicity and support.  In effect their limiting their own profits for ideological reasons.  So, this is the takeaway for authors.  In order to get seen you have to tailor your work to fit the gatekeepers’ requirements or you have to market your work to an audience that doesn’t know you’re there.

Well marketing is a serious business and based on what I’ve read cracking the Amazon algorithm is not for the faint of heart.  But still, I think trying to find an audience for your book is preferable to writing a book you don’t like in order to get an editor to approve it.

So, a marketing I will go.

Angry Old Joe and Better Things

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I scanned through about five minutes of Joe Biden’s “old man shouting at the camera” routine.  Well, he didn’t fall down or begin speaking literal gibberish.  But I found it intolerable after just a few minutes.  I guess it could be summed up as Ukraine, abortion and January 6th.”  Okay, let’s see how that works out for him.  Maybe everyone will forget that their jobs are being given to illegal aliens that are also assaulting and murdering their wives and daughters.  And maybe they’ll forget that everything is now twice as expensive as it was during Trump’s term in office.  So maybe the Dems will be able to win the November election by fraud.  I guess we’ll see.  But it’s time to look around and spend our time thinking about and doing things that we consider important.

And that goes for me too.  Serializing my incomplete novel has been an interesting experience for me.  It has taken me a lot of time to get about half way through writing it and you kind of forget how you thought up various scenes and bits of dialogue.  So, seeing the beginning again is an odd case of seeing it with new eyes.  I guess I’ve been pleasantly surprised with what I’ve reread.  It seems to hold up pretty well.  Of course, you always find small mistakes and even inconsistencies that have to be tweaked.  But all in all, it isn’t half bad.  And that is immensely gratifying for me and gives me the encouragement I need to start banging away at the second half of the story.  And this rereading has also given me some new insights into some additions that I need to make to fill in some holes that I now find in the story.  It really was necessary to get about this far in the story before I could have enough perspective about the tempo and the balance of the various story lines.

Of course, the hardest part for an author is to find a publisher and/or a market for his literary offspring.  After listening to a podcast about how incredibly difficult it is to get self-published science fiction novels “recognized” on the Kindle site I think I’ll try to see if I can interest any of the traditional publishing companies in my deathless prose.  After all, who could fail to recognize the brilliant writing, the deep psychological truth in the characters’ underpinnings and the timeless quality of the epic struggle between the King of the Mole Men and the faceless, soulless minions of unspeakable evil?  Wait a minute.  Is mole-men two words or a hyphenate?

Well, regardless.  Thanks to all that have plowed through the chapters and please feel free to send along criticism and thoughts on how you think the story should proceed.  I’ve only put up on the site about two thirds of what I’ve already written so there’s still a bit to go but I’m sure many people can guess some of how this story proceeds.  There is an inexorable logic to how a clandestine war is prosecuted and where the dramatic tension needs to exist.  Suffice it to say that things need to start going wrong for our heroes pretty soon.  But I’m sure everything will be resolved by the final chapter.

Or maybe not everything.  There’s always got to be a sequel you know.

 

“Oh if I were the King of the Mole Men, Not queen, not duke, not prince.

My regal robes of the Mole Men, would be satin, not cotton, not chintz.”

Zen and the Art of Snow Removal

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In New England choosing a snow removal method is kind of like choosing a religion.  There’s the mainstream snowblower sect.  Then there are those plow guys both the ones that mount it to their family truck and the ones who buy those ATV looking vehicles that zip around after major snowstorms cleaning off people’s driveways.  They’re probably pagans or something.  Then there are the hardliners who own a tractor to which they can attach plows, blowers, even trailers in which the snow can be collected.  These guys are ready for the apocalypse.  And finally, there are the fundamentalists; the shovel guys.  To them moving the snow is the punishment we all deserve.

A week ago, I was walking in the haunted forests and swamps of Dunwich and observing the first little buds and leaves opening up on all the thorn bushes, briars and poison ivy vines.  But now there’s eight inches of snow out there again!

And so, I spent Tuesday and today on snow removal.  I skipped Wednesday because, dammit I’m an American.  My weapons were the snowblower, the snow shovel and the ice scraping shovel (technically it’s a roofing shovel used to scrape the shingles off a roof, but it’s really good for smashing and scraping ice off a driveway).  And I got all of the top driveway done and the lower driveway so-so.

And that’s just in time for tonight’s predicted one to four inches of new snow.  Now what kind of prediction is 1-4 inches?  When the maximum is 400% of the minimum it shouldn’t be called a prediction.  Clueless guess is probably closer to the truth.  But the last five hours of snow removal has brought me back to the zen-like state that eventually sets in near the end of a New England winter.  And this is even true during extremely mild winters as we’ve had the last three or four years.  Because an inch of ice can cause more grief and work than two feet of dry snow.  In the zen state you abandon the idea of gritting your teeth and pushing through until spring.  It’s too long.  There are still seven weeks until snow is unlikely.  So, you must embrace the crappy weather and become one with it.

And so there I was, lavishing loving attention on asphalt that needed the snow coaxed off of it with a light, almost delicate touch to the shovel at just the perfect angle to get it to peel off the pavement.  I experienced ineffable contentment as I worked down the driveway six inches at a time.  I had become a snow clearing zombie.  And I loved Big Brother.

As you can tell I’m suffering from the last stages of cabin fever and I’m contemplating warning Camera Girl to abandon the Compound until spring when hopefully I’ll regain my sanity.  She knows my weaknesses and it’s just too reminiscent of Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Jack Torrance in the movie version of “The Shining.”  If I do go berserk, I won’t use the weapons that Jack Torrance took up (a fire axe in the movie and a roque mallet in the book).  I will instead embrace my most formidable weapon, bad puns.  The poor woman.

Anyway, I’m enjoying the posting of my novel fragment.  It’s cathartic to put it out in the real world and get feedback.  I’ve been trying to figure out a strategy to get it in the public eye.  I’m thinking about putting it on a crowd-funding site to see how much visibility that would give it.  If anyone knows which sites are best for our side of the political spectrum, please chime in.

You and Here

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Because of their neurological abnormalities many Leftists are truly miserable people and therefore pathologically envious of normal people for being happy.  And that’s why a big part of the leftist project is to make us miserable.

Taking the fun out of our lives is a very big part of their work.  That is specifically why they are always in our faces about everything they don’t want us doing.  We can’t enjoy sports or activities or entertainment the way we want to because they have to decide how those things get done.  And worst of all they say we can’t do them without their participation.  And that’s why they especially hate things that they can’t share in.  That’s why shooting ranges and normal families are anathema.  Those things are bad fun because they exclude them categorically.

And so, whenever we are happy, in a real sense, we are measurably hurting the leftist project.  So, there is the justification for the “pursuit of happiness.”  But over the last half century it’s gotten harder and harder to just enjoy life.  Too many components of it have been compromised and degraded by the Left.

But that makes it more important than ever to find the means to bring joy into our lives.  Even if you are a “happy warrior,” fighting the culture war 24/7 is not a recipe for hilarity.  Sure, mocking the Left can be fun to some extent but there is a definite tendency to become a grim, glum purveyor of gloom and doom.

And I find that this very syndrome has infected me to a greater extent than I like.  And thinking about it today I realized I need to begin prioritizing a lot more fun into my week.  Chronicling the outrages of the week is mostly a dour and depressing occupation.  Even schadenfreude over some leftist’s misfortune is a weak substitute for some constructive endeavor or even some mindless fun like watching a goofy movie.

As I’ve said previously, I’ll be trying to wean myself off the outrage stuff.  To start with I think I’ll start publishing parts of my stories on the site and adding more content on creative topics like photography and science fiction/fantasy.  I’ve lately been reading about how difficult it is to get genre fiction discovered on Amazon because the algorithms are specifically calibrated for authors who release materials exclusively through the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program.  In addition, the algorithms are optimized for book series that release a new volume every month.  For that reason, authors now write at least three series novels in advance in order to get noticed by that algorithm.  Now this sounds like madness to me.  Following that logic, an author should probably write a decalogy series all at once before finding out whether anyone wants to read it.  And in fact, it seems that a really mediocre series has a much better chance of being a hit than a single novel even if it is remarkably well-written and interesting.

Well, we do live in a strange world.  So, I figure I should start putting my stuff out there and at least have the satisfaction of publishing it on my own platform.  At least I’ll get some constructive feedback from the sf&f fans on the site.  And it’ll be fun.

H. L. Mencken is quoted as defining puritanism as, “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”  And I think he was exactly right.  We need to enjoy life.  We will still have to fight the culture wars but we can’t put our lives, our happiness on hold until we win.  So let the someone, somewhere being happy be you, here.

IT HAS ALL BEEN SAID

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I’ve looked over my output for the last year.  It’s all the same thing.  It’s all been said.  I can’t say it again.

At this point talking about what needs to be done has very little value.  So, I’ll talk about things that I find interesting.  Maybe it’ll be technology or science or photography or science fiction or maybe it’ll be some current event that I think is noteworthy.  I’ll try to keep the outrage over Biden’s atrocities to a minimum since we all know they’re coming and talking about them doesn’t really accomplish anything.

If I see something happening that is progress, that’ll be discussed.  For instance, the red state governors sending illegal aliens to sanctuary cities worked!  It struck a nerve, it discombobulated them.  It was successful and that is newsworthy and worth discussion.  And if someone has some original and thought-provoking theory on how the world will be changing in the future and I think it’s worth discussing I might link to it and put in my two cents.

As I get a chance to make some progress on my sf book, I’ll probably put a few chunks of it up for comment.  And I’ll start doing more reviews of movies and books.  But banging on the “something must be done” drum has gotten too dull.  I’m preaching to the choir and the choir will start heading for the doors soon.

Things will be changing but hopefully folks will still find stuff here that they find interesting and worthwhile.  So, my daily announcement that the sky is falling has been cancelled and instead I’ll leave something entertaining.