Category: Life in Dunwich

My Adventures in the Mythical New England Town of Dunwich

Practical Applications of Riemannian-Bishopian Dimensional Translations – Part 1

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Farmer Cthulhu in His Fields

Dunwich is a very odd place.  First of all, you’ll notice that it does not appear on any map of New England.  And this is both an advantage and a disadvantage.  On the plus side it limits the amount of traffic that traverses its roads.  On the minus side it’s darn hard to enter and leave it.  For instance, there are no gas stations in Dunwich so whenever I need to fill up the old gas tank, I have to find a way out of town and find my way back in again afterward.  And it’s not a matter of just heading down any road until you reach the town limits.  Strictly speaking there are no limits.  If you travel on Aylesbury Pike past Sentinel Hill for about three hours you’ll come back to Sentinel Hill again.  And if you turn off at Whateley Lane and go for about two hours, you’ll notice a singularity in the middle of the road.  And if you get too close to it, you’ll be pulled in and find yourself in the alimentary canal of Yog Sothoth.  And that’s not a good place to be.  So, you can see that commuting is somewhat problematic.  But for all of the locals it’s really just an acquired skill that is taught from father to son.  It’s all a matter of geometry.  Einstein believed that our space time was a variety of non-Euclidean geometry called Riemannian.  And it is.  However, Dunwich has a different geometry called Bishopian after the famous Dunwichian mathematician (or wizard) Septimus Bishop who measured the curvature of Dunwichian space and codified the equations for translating back and forth between the two universes.

The mathematics is too complex for most people without advanced training to follow.  On a practical level if you close your right eye and squint your left and slam down the accelerator just at the right location on the Dunwich side, you’ll reach normal space.  And from normal space if you close your left eye and squint with your right eye while slamming on the breaks you can return to Dunwichian space from some well-known anomalies.

For the most part this kind of travel is a routine.  But every once in a while, something seems to go wrong.  I was driving at night in a snow storm in Dunwich a few years back and I sneezed too hard and must have activated an anomaly.  When I blinked my eyes open again, it was broad daylight and obviously a summer day in some warm climate.  I found out I was in Tallahassee Florida and it was six months in the past.  And this caused all kinds of problems when I got back to Dunwich and ran into my earlier self, watching tv in my living room.  I had a devil of a time murdering my doppelganger and sinking him in the swamp.  He seemed to know all of my fighting tricks and just refused to die like a good sport.  Some people are like that.

Pass the Paschal Lamb

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Well, Easter has arrived and Camera Girl is killing the fatted calf (well, she’s serving beef anyway).  She’s going all out and in addition to the roast beast there will be lamb and a pasta course with the requisite meatballs and sausage, and various other paschal delicacies like stuffed mushrooms, rice balls and so forth.  So that means we’ll be stuffed to the gills by the time dessert is served.  She’s serving four different homemade cakes and various ice cream flavors along with Klondike Bars which are an especial favorite of several individuals (including me!).

All of this food will incapacitate some of the attendees (including me!).  Probably the girls will avoid the worst ravages as they are more moderate in their grazing and sluicing habits.  Whereas all three generations of men will be fighting over possession of the recliners in the living room to better accommodate their bulging stomachs and comatose brains.  I don’t assume there will be any great demand for movies from this tranquilized crowd but just in case I’m trying to decide what classic cinema I should have queued up for their viewing pleasure.  I think when I was a kid the choices were “The Ten Commandments,” “Ben Hur” or “The Wizard of Oz.”  Now “Ben Hur” is easily lined up with Easter.  “The Ten Commandments” also is linked since the Last Supper occurred on Passover and the movie chronicles the occasion of the first Passover.

But exactly what is the link between Easter and “The Wizard of Oz?”  I guess back in the 1960s the television networks must have had to pay top dollar to air that children’s favorite and they must have thought it would seem even more special if it happened when families gathered for a holiday.  I guess I can continue the tradition this year.  Well, unless the kids stage an insurrection and demand some vapid modern show.

Of course I could go another direction altogether.  A double feature of mid-century science fiction (let’s say “Them!” and “The Thing from Another World”) or W. C. Fields’ “It’s a Gift” and “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.”  Both of these options would provide entertainment that greatly exceeds what would typically be found on the cable channels today.

But maybe what we should do instead is even more revolutionary.  Maybe we should sit around and talk.  After all, how often does the family all get together in one place and find out how we’re all doing?  There’s a lot going on in the family.  Businesses are being started, students are entering the work force.  There’s even a romance that will be represented at the table I believe.  That’s a lot to discuss.  Maybe that’s what we should do.  After all, pretty soon those finishing school will start dispersing far and wide and since I’m getting up there who knows how many more times, we’ll meet face to face.  So, I should take the opportunity to spend some time talking to them while I can.  I think that’s what I’ll do.  Let’s see how that works out.

Time to Make the Donuts

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So, I’m busy, busy, busy with my giveaway on BookFunnel (here’s the link).  I’m also seeing if I can put part or all of it up on a site called Royal Road.  And I’m posting links on my X feed to try to connect with the wider world.  And if any of you want a free copy or have any friends who might like the story, please pass the link along to them.

Well, in addition to all this I’ve been drafted into a publicity campaign for the Dunwich Republicans.  I’ve got to awaken a “sleeping giant.”  But it’s more like a geriatric midget in a coma.  So even if I can drum up new blood, I’m afraid they’ll just show up, hear there’s work to be done and say, “Looks like you’re doing a great job.  CARRY ON!!!

But one must do the best one can.  As old TR used to remind us it’s “The Man in the Arena” that counts.  Unfortunately, I feel more like the Christian being fed to the lions in that arena.

Well, the weather is just as uncertain as ever with one day being seventy degrees and the next day featuring snow flurries but we’ve definitely turned a corner and the Great Southern Ice Sheet is barely a foot thick and receding rapidly.  All the spring flowers are budding and the turtles are sitting on the dead log in the swamp.  The mallards must be awaiting the hatching of their eggs and even the local pair of hawks seem to be hyperactive, probably getting food for their nest.

Listening to Andy Weir talk to the Critical Drinker about his book “The Martian” was kind of exciting.  I think anyone who writes a book secretly desires to be that guy who hits the jackpot and has the world beat a path to his door.  I mean, I know it’s ridiculously unlikely for a number of reasons for my book to be a big seller.  It’s in a very restricted corner of the marketplace based on politics and demographics and trying to get advertising is like pulling teeth.  But I confess I not-so-secretly dream of the book going viral and selling tons and tons of copies.  I guess when the dust settles, I’ll probably be in a funk for a while but I think it was still a good experience to try my hand at something I’ve wanted to do since I was a teenager.

And I’ll say that I don’t think that writing a good book is beyond my talents.  But self-publishing and self-marketing is not for the faint of heart.  It takes money and a lot of hard work to promote a book in the current marketplace.  And that’s the part I don’t enjoy at all.  Playing cat and mouse with the Amazon algorithm isn’t my idea of a fun occupation.  It’s more like going to the dentist’s office than something associated with creativity.

Ah well.  Whine, whine, whine.  Time to make the donuts.  Onward and upward.  Excelsior!

Persistence of Memory

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I was at my mechanic’s shop to have the rear brakes replaced on my “new” car.  Well, long story short, getting replacement parts from Toyota was going to take longer than expected so I couldn’t wait around.  I called Camera Girl for a lift home.  While I was waiting for her, I started reading some of the stuff he had on the walls of the shop.  There were photos of the cars the shop was selling and the first one was from 1930.  That’s ninety-six years ago.  And the place has had the same last name all this time.  Now Steve looks to be about my age.  That means his grandfather was probably about thirty years old in 1930 (in that ballpark).  Looking at those photos and illustrations from the 1930s was interesting.  His grandfather and probably his father and maybe his uncles have been working at this business for generations.  That would explain why he seems unflappable with respect to mechanical problems.  You probably see almost everything when you’ve been working around cars your whole life.

And here was this company in a tiny town in southern New England lasting for generations and serving a community that know each other from birth to death and beyond.  And that got me thinking of where I came from.  The Brooklyn neighborhood where I was born was just as solid to my eyes when I was young.  The people had been there for generations.  They had their traditions and institutions and a sense of community.  There was a feeling of permanence.  But that was an illusion.  All it took to annihilate that illusion was crime and poverty.  And over the course of time that entire neighborhood disappeared without a trace.  I’ve been back there, mostly for funerals.  And that’s the funny thing.  The Catholic church is still there although it has all the masses in Spanish now.  So, the old people come back for their funerals and then they’re driven out to be buried in Long Island.  And then their children and grandchildren disperse back to the four corners of the Earth.

So that’s the difference.  New England still has towns and those towns still have families that live here for generations.  Maybe not everyone stays put.  But enough so that you can feel like you come from a place that isn’t just going to blow away when the wind shifts.  And I think that’s actually something worth having.  We’ve been programmed to believe that we can drift across the continent finding work where it happens to be and move our kids and expect that everything will be like it was when we were kids.  But I don’t think it works that way.  You don’t have traditions without permanence and you don’t have a neighborhood when you don’t even know who your neighbors are.  And if you only see your family at weddings and (worse) at funerals, then how quickly will family become strangers?  Well just something I thought about while waiting for a ride.

Various Public Relations

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So, Tuesday I have a meeting with my marketer to see how I can achieve more of my goals for the launch.  The book seems to be sustaining sales but I’m not satisfied with the visibility with respect to reviews and general profile.  As I’ve mentioned I’m going to find out just how large a giveaway I can expect to perform.  Now, I have no idea whether this makes any sense at all.  After all, as a tactic giving something away for free seems to be defeating the purpose of sales.  But my whole reason for writing this book, is to get other people to read it too.  And if you’re competing with literally millions of other books and some of them have multi-billion-dollar companies marketing them then it may take extreme methods to break out of obscurity and catch the public’s eye.  And then again, I may just be kidding myself.  But I think I’m very close to making a decision on the path forward.

And there’s not much time left before I’ll be overtaken by other responsibilities and projects.  First Selectman Cthulhu has selected me as his personal spokesman with responsibilities for communicating his agenda to both the human population of Dunwich and also the trans-dimensional realm of the Great Old Ones.  That’s right I’ll be updating his LinkedIn and TikTok pages.  Currently he’s asked me to edit out the use of words like crush, dismember, maim and devour in his recent communications.  He’s up for re-election and he needs to finesse his image quite a bit.  I’ve suggested he watch several of the recent Godzilla movies and figure out how to mimic the joie de vivre of that radioactive reptile who has managed to cultivate a laid back and avuncular style in the last few years.  I told him he might want to think about a facelift.  But then he reminded me that technically he really doesn’t have a face.  It’s more of a foot with eyes, mouth and tentacles.  Well, a rose by any other name.

On the home front, Mr. and Mrs. Mallard have returned to dismal puddle and seemed very satisfied with whatever slop has run into the swamp.  Also, a pair of wood ducks have also appeared but I notice they are much more skittish than the mallards.  Well, it takes all kinds.  So far, we haven’t seen any ducklings.  Time will tell.

And I’ve cut down all of the raspberry canes and put about five pounds of 10-10-10 fertilizer on the bed in anticipation of a bumper crop this year.  I’m hoping it will expand significantly beyond the current patch and eventually triple into the whole garden.  This is a matter of turning necessity into a virtue since nothing else seems to flourish besides raspberries in that soggy area.

The southern ice sheet has retreated back to the massive driveway pile which is now only three feet high.  At the current rate of retreat, I calculate it will disappear completely by Memorial Day.  At which point the last of it will end up in my drink cooler for that barbecue event.

Well, things are moving apace.  Excelsior!

Vernal Equinox 2026

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According to Grok the vernal equinox occurred on Friday, March 20, 2026, at 10:46 a.m. EDT.  At that time Camera Girl and I were probably in Walmart buying eggs, coffee and chop meat.  When we got to the register the cashier was this friendly talkative old lady who wanted to tell us that if we took out one of our eggs, we could balance it on its end.  She explained that it was because of “the e-quick.”  Well, she was a very nice lady so I smiled and said, “That’s great.”

The reason I was along on this expedition was because Camera Girl’s twenty-year-old ride (Nelly) was in the shop and the surgeon wasn’t too sanguine on Nelly’s future.  The brake lines were leaking but when Dr. Steve put her up on the lift, he found metastatic rust throughout the length and breadth of poor Nelly.  Camera Girl was devastated and so was my bank account.  The surgeon asked if a mercy-killing wasn’t the best option but as a devout “right to lifer” I said, “No!!!!”  So, Dr. Steve left me with the sad news and said it would take a few days to get the parts and finish the work.

But when we got home slightly after the equinox, there was a message from Dr. Steve saying we could bring the patient home.  We rushed to find Nelly looking alive and well.  Dr. Steve said it was “a miracle.”  Nelly wasn’t as far gone as he had initially thought.  And equally importantly it hadn’t cost as much as I had feared.  So, Camera Girl and Nelly were reunited.  They drove home together and later on I celebrated this Equinox Miracle with a bowl of vanilla ice cream.

But the larger lesson I’ve learned is that nothing lasts forever.  Not even blue Toyota Corollas.  The power of New England winter road salt is existential.  The body of a car may look pristine with a bright paint job and a functional cd player in the dash board.  But the mortality that follows from chloride corrosion cracking is as final and fatal as death itself.  Nelly has served us faithfully and well.  And generations of our dogs have had their own blankets on the back seats that they relax on during trips to the vet’s office and the nail clipping place.  And decades of grandkids have sat in the back seat elbowing each other and complaining about how cramped they are.  But very soon all this will be disrupted.  They will notice that Camera Girl’s old car is no more.  And she is very sad about the whole thing.  I am too!  I have to buy another car.

Well, never look a gift horse in the mouth.  We’ve been given a reprieve and I’ll start figuring out what Nelly II will be.  And it turned out to be a nice day walking between stores and parking lots and I even had a nice review for my book on Amazon and some more sales.  So, all in all it wasn’t a bad e-quick as e-quicks go.

It Could Be Huge

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Just as I planned, we ate a late and leisurely breakfast today.  It was as warm and sunny as forecast.  Walking out in the sun by a frozen lake was very enjoyable and I even took a few photos just to prove I still remember how.  Then Camera Girl and I drove over to the big city (ha!) and had some Thai food.  Splendiferous.

I went over the communication I received from my book marketer and set up what I hope is a productive post-launch meeting where I can finalize a plan to finish off the launch with a large number of readers getting their hands on the book in the next week or so.

Apparently, there is a website called BookFunnel that will allow me to run a giveaway in exchange for the customer’s e-mail address.  This will facilitate follow-on advertising of my sequel books and other writing projects.  In conjunction with this the marketer thinks I should produce a follow-on epilog or teaser to entice the readers to sign up for some program of material that I will produce in the future.  All very interesting, but what I’m also interested in finding out is whether the traction I created with the launch is indicative of a book and sequels that will be popular or not very popular.  I basically don’t have any real knowledge about what a popular book start-up looks like.

I’ve sold a little over a hundred and twenty copies to date and that doesn’t seem to be an overwhelming response by the book buying public.  I was hoping for more like a hundred and twenty million copies or even a hundred and twenty thousand copies.  I’ve had to cancel my rental of MetLife Stadium for my book signing event.  Instead, I’ve taped together three or four of the boxes that Camera Girl gets her dog food bags delivered in and set them up in the lower driveway.  I hope it doesn’t rain soon.  That tape’s not so strong.  I’ll be giving away free key chains with the name of my local mechanic on them.  He had them out on the counter and I thought he wouldn’t mind if I took a few (or all) of them.  I don’t think he bought one of my books so I think it’ll be alright.

For my next book, maybe I’ll attempt to reach viral status using a best-seller adjacent name.  In other words, I’ll make it sound like some other popular work.  For instance, “Reacher” is a very commercially lucrative series.  So maybe I could have a series with a character named “Reached.”  He could be like Reacher only in the past tense.  So instead of being enormously large and strong I’ll make my character big but kind of old and worn out.  Sort of like Reacher in thirty years.  And he could fight crime but only in retirement villages and old age homes.  And his tag line will be, “What did you say?  Speak up you young punk!”  I think it could be huge.

Ah, That Was a Proper 2026

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So today it got up to 66οF and tonight it’s only going to get down to 38οF.  Tomorrow I’m off from work and it’s gonna be 67 οF and sunny all day, with no wind.  So, tomorrow is the official first day of un-winter.  Camera Girl and I will officially get up a half hour later, eat a leisurely breakfast, stroll around the devastated grounds and then go for a ride and walk around a lake, take a few photographs then go into town and have something special for lunch; maybe Chinese or Thai.  Life begins again.

Except for the north side of the garage roof, all the roof snow is practically gone.  And some areas of vegetation (mangled and brown) have reappeared behind the retreating snow.  Obviously, the absurdly high piles of snow I created over the course of the last few weeks will be there well into April (and in places into May) but those will just be there as a cautionary tale about the folly of living in New England.

The west field will be soggy for weeks while the snow retreats there last.  But within a week or two I intend to go there and cut down all of the raspberry canes and spread fertilizer on that bed.  Last year that program provided a bonanza of berries and I intend to duplicate that procedure this spring.  But the truly awful production we got out of the squash, eggplants and cucumbers over there has convinced me to move all of these beds to the south field.  I’m going to dig up a good chunk of lawn over there and plant vegetables and transplant some flowers that have languished too close to the forest shade.

So, there is a plan going forward and plenty of work to do.  But it’s just so good to finally be freed from sitting around in the house staring out at a world of snow.  They talk about cabin fever and I know exactly what they mean.  It’s a depressing, nervous state where you have to invent things to do to keep your mind off of your imprisonment.  It’s a time when you try to stick to exercise regimens just to avoid becoming a pile of mush over the inactivity of the winter.  And the short days just makes it worse because darkness makes you sleepy.

Okay, I’ll put all that behind me.  Winter 2025/2026 is officially dead and buried.  Even if we have that stupid April Fools’ Day nor’easter this year, it’s just there to provide “poor man’s fertilizer” for the vegetation.  I predict 2026 will be a very productive year with interesting scientific and technological news and improvements on the economic front.  But most important I predict that summer 2026 will provide the most memorable cookouts, barbecues and grilling that will be talked about for the next decade and will become a byword for successful outdoor parties.  Like some Shire gaffer, in the future you’ll see me eating a cheeseburger smothered in onions and relish and here me declare, “Ah, that was a proper 2026!”

08MAR2026 – This’N’That

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Today I spent a chunk of time with a roof rake pulling snow off the lower roofs.  These roofs have heavy plastic cleats glued to the metal to keep the snow from sliding into the gutters but there was so much snow that the weight cracked the glue and so these enormously heavy blocks of ice and snow were falling down onto the upper and lower driveways and blocking the routes we use to reach the road.  So, I forced the issue and pulled down all (most) of the snow with the rake and then spent a few hours moving the snow away with a shovel and wheelbarrow.  I was planning to use the snowblower to move the snow but all those plastic cleats would be bad for the rotating parts and it would have taken me so long to separate them out using a garden rake that I said, “to hell with it” and just used the wheelbarrow and shovel.  Well, they say work develops character and Camera Girl says I’m a character so it must be working.

I’ve had some interesting conversations on X with another author and he seemed genuinely interested in how my characters would advance in a sequel so I told him I should send him the e-book and then he could see the challenges I’m going to face deciding how I’ll clean up the mess I’ve created in the first book.  Also, I’m hoping to get a review out of him.  Of course, he’s not a genre fiction author so it may not be his cup of tea so I may not get a highly positive review but honest feedback is valuable so I’m interested.

Tomorrow, third grandson is coming over to spend time with us and absorb mass quantities of spaghetti and meatballs followed by mint chocolate chip ice cream.  He’s starting high school next year so I’ll have to try and up my game.  I wonder what form of entertainment he’ll favor.  I know this year his whole family has been on a hockey kick.  While hockey is far from my favorite form of entertainment, I feel I must try to adapt myself to the grandkids as best I can.  After all they’re the future and I’m practically extinct.

I got in touch with my marketer and said I wanted to discuss strategies to maximize numbers of readers by minimizing cost to the reader (up to and including giveaways).  She said I should make a point to collect e-mail addresses to allow for follow up advertising for sequels.  I will study her message and formulate some specific questions to facilitate getting answers at the meeting.  I’ve found marketing a book is an onerous task that’s far from fun.  At this point I want a strategy that sustains itself with minimal demands on my time.  But I may not get the answers I’m hoping for.

Alright, that’s enough for now.  I’m trying to stay away from the news of wars and scandals and elections and other tawdry concerns.  The world is certainly a messy place.

A Big Crazy Idea

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I have this crazy idea.  I want to get my book into the hands of an enormous number of people.  I heard of a guy whose book was given out to a hundred thousand people by some corporation for some reason unknown to me.  And after that it became very popular and sold millions of copies.  Now obviously that’s a crazy thing.  I think this was a hundred thousand physical copies not e-books.  Why a corporation would pay for a hundred thousand copies of a book to then give them away doesn’t make any sense unless it’s the Gideons giving away the Bible at hotels.

But for whatever reason it intrigues me.  Now theoretically I can give away a hundred thousand copies of my e-book by emailing them.  Of course, an e-mail provider will charge some fee for that much bandwidth.  But in terms of the files they’re free.  The trick would be to interest a hundred thousand people to request the book and actually read it.  There are book sale sites (e.g., Smashwords) that allow you to lower the sale price to zero.  But the trick would be to attract the right audience for the book.

I admit it’s kind of a goofy idea.  The whole reason for writing a book is to get people to pay you money for the privilege of reading it.  This stands that concept on its head.  But I think it’d get more satisfaction from knowing that a huge number of people had read my story than having a few hundred pay me for buying it.

I have a lot more research to do to figure out all the details of how doing something like this would work.  I want to target a right-leaning audience and so I’m looking at advertising on one of the right-leaning sites like Red State or something like it.  But one of the things is making sure it doesn’t cost me too much money.  After all I’m not a trillionaire.  I’m just a regular old multi-billionaire you know.

My book sales on Amazon reached one hundred tonight.  Maybe that was what triggered this megalomania.  After all it’s only a few orders of magnitude between a hundred and a hundred thousand.  What’s that between friends after all?  But I have learned a little bit about how difficult it is to reach across the “digital barrier” and communicate with the mass of humanity out there.  It requires you to master the secrets of the “algorithm” and “search engine optimization.”  Either that or you have to shell out a lot of dough.

But I’ll have to say it must have been more fun in the old days when a writer could sell a short story to Analog for a few hundred bucks and have a hundred thousand people read that story and give their feedback in just days or weeks.  I know there are now digital equivalents.  There’s a site called Royal Road where free content is uploaded and people vote with their eyeballs.  And maybe I’ll go that route.  Of course, I understand that most of the content is sort of video game fan fiction which is completely impenetrable to me.  And maybe an audience for my stuff would never show up there.  But I should look into it.  Well anyway, enough about this.  I’ll figure it out and see if it can be done and if it’s worth it to me or not.  Ah, the trials and tribulations of a great literary artist.  Oh, the pain, the pain.