Category: Life in Dunwich

My Adventures in the Mythical New England Town of Dunwich

We’ve Got to Have Priorities

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Christmas Cooking, Sony A7 III, Sony 90mm f\2.8 macro lens

Well, Christmas has arrived.  No not the Day or the Eve.  We’re still four or five days away but the reality has landed.  On Sunday, Camera Girl and her daughters and granddaughter will be making Christmas cookies all day.  Now this is a major event in the holiday.  When it happens, I can grab a cookie or two with every cup of coffee she serves between now and Christmas (and even a while after).  So, this ushers in the end of reasonable eating habits until the end of the holiday.  I approximate I’ll put on five pounds between now and then.  And at my age that’s a burden because losing five pounds is painful.  It’ll take three or four weeks to shed it.

But I have to admit it’s worth it.  Christmas dinner will include both roast beef and home-made lasagna.  And I have already seen the ingredients for ricotta cheese cake and several half gallons of very good ice cream.  I even complained bitterly until she stocked up on some Klondike Bars.  I know for a fact that several of the grandchildren love them and I refused to miss out on a chance to spoil the little guys.  As I’ve stated before, I believe my chance at immortality depends on their good opinion of me after I go to that big website in the sky.  So, I groused about the ice cream and voila!  I saw them in the groceries yesterday.

So yeah, I’ll eat too much rich food and will be pretty groggy by December 26th.

But it’s worth it.  After all, the next real holiday after this is Valentine’s Day and that’s a month and a half away.  Plus, that’s just one small meal.  The next respectable eating marathon is Easter.  And whether that’s the end of March or the beginning of April that’s an eternity away.  We’ll even be close to the end of winter and that’s an eternity away from right now.  So, I’ll begin enjoying myself with those cookies and I’ll continue with my holiday movie viewing ritual and that should insulate me from whatever insanity is breaking loose in the “so-called” real world.  And it’s working I’ve skipped right over the psychopaths shooting up innocent people at colleges and on beaches and wherever else they want to target humanity.  I’ll just let the other pundits address these depressing abominations.

I’ll concentrate on coming up with a decent line of conversation with my grandchildren and providing a chance for my children and their spouses to relax for a few hours while I distract their children with desserts and black and white movies.  That seems like a worthwhile endeavor in this crazy world we inhabit.  I won’t think about the plans at the state capitol to raise our taxes to make up for the Biden dollars that aren’t flowing in any more.  I won’t worry about the attempts to make homeless encampments permanent all over the state.  Instead, I’ll compare the relative merits of the various cinematic portrayals of Bob Cratchit over the years.  Yeah, Cratchit should be next.

Jake Barter – A Man for All Seasons – Well, Summer Anyway

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Jake Barter is a shadowy figure who inhabits the Compound somewhere in the semi-mythical town of Dunwich, New England (state unspecified).  He is the sole proprietor of the website Orion’s Cold Fire and splits his time between battling the eldritch horror and annoying bureaucracy of Dunwich’s First Selectman Cthulhu and pursuing his avocations (science fiction writing, macrophotography and right-wing politics).  His schooling was in math, chemistry, engineering and classical languages.  In a past life he designed biopharmaceutical processing plants.  Now he concentrates on getting a decently brewed cup of coffee every morning.  He is happily married to Camera Girl and enjoys the status of patriarch, surrounded by his descendants and their relations.

This is the Author’s Bio I put on Amazon today.  For a figment of my imagination, it comes reasonably close to being a facsimile of me.  If I had known what a pain in the neck it is selling a book I might have been dissuaded from doing it.  There’s an enormous amount of hand-waving and classifying and “key words” and other stuff that I thought I could slough off on other people entirely.  Then there’s Amazon Ads and Goodreads approval and before you know it I’ll have to be interviewed by Oprah and the View.

But there is some progress being made.  I got my e-book listed with a pre-order page and an Author’s Page for Jake Barter up on Amazon and on Sunday a proof copy of the paperback will be arriving.  Supposedly it has some kind of watermark on it to designate it as “not for sale.”  But I’ll be playing around with it like a dog with his favorite bone.

As I mentioned the other day, this week was the first time I started thinking about what might be in the next book taking place in that “world.”  This one will have Connors trying to deal with a fractured America.  President Chastain and the red and blue states will be brokering short term arrangements as the Constitutional Convention is set up.  There will be plenty to discuss while the red states stand by the exits in case “business as usual” is what ends up prevailing.

I’m thinking of inventing a character who demands a new Declaration of Independence that includes the statement, “All Men are Created Unequal and endowed by their Creator with unique characteristics that require free association to ensure nobody has to be forced to endure unbearable neighbors.”

Now, that might sound as if it’s clear enough to avoid the same problems we’re having now from happening again.  But I’m convinced that’s not true.  It’s not the words on the paper.  It’s not even the way the government is structured.  It’s inherent in human beings that they will twist whatever arrangements they live under to unfairly advantage themselves over their neighbors.  The Greeks and Romans went through these same things.  The rich and the powerful bend the government to their advantage and make their neighbors slaves.

Maybe the best way to deal with this is to tear the whole thing down to the ground every two hundred and fifty years.  Give everyone the same amount of stuff and start over.  It probably couldn’t be any worse than what happens if you don’t.  Well let’s see what George and Paul come up with.

Let Jake Barter Work on That for a While

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Now that I’ve assumed the persona of Jake Barter, my whole life has changed.  Jake Barter is no ordinary man.  At the very least he has the training of a double nought secret agent and the social connections of Bruce Wayne.  His resume is a combination of special forces operator and philosopher king.  And because of this I told Camera Girl that she needed to treat me with much greater respect and an almost religious awe.

I don’t think she “gets it” yet.  You know what they say about a prophet in his own country.  Well, that goes double for a pseudonymous author.  I think I may now begin to write the memoirs of Jake Barter in my spare time.  I think he will be a picaresque character who gets involved in serious situations like wars, revolutions and social movements and ends up causing things to go south in horribly predictable ways based on his sloth, greed and phenomenal incompetence.  His only redeeming qualities are monumental overconfidence, enormous likeability and unbelievable luck.  I’m thinking I’ll start him off as a special advisor to Trump on constitutional law and then take it from there.

But seriously, I am thinking about new characters for future stories and I think the next thing I do will have a strong humorous streak in it.  And this is because I do enjoy making fun of things I don’t like and combining that with a writing project should make it a lot of fun for me.  But what I must do is decide if it will be in the same “universe” as “The Sniper.”  So far there isn’t a lot of humor there and maybe it would be better to separate a new project from a place with so much trauma lurking around every turn.  And that’s fine.  Making up multiple fictional worlds allows the author to escape from any traps he’s gotten himself into in the old ones.  You can get tired of a scenario or you just need a break from figuring out how to keep your characters from either getting killed or solving all their problems.  After all, either of those paths ends the story.  So, you have to be constantly threading the needle to maintain the overall “problem” but still carve out a piece of plotline to make the present installment interesting.

I think I might want to do an extraterrestrial story.  I’ve played around with some short story / novella length things in the past but they just petered out.  I think this time I’ll try to storyboard a whole bunch of stuff first so I have a direction and enough plot lines and an overarching direction for the thing before I get really started.  And what is currently completely stymying me is deciding what kind of Earth this will be.  Will it be like the actual current day disaster we are living through or will it be some kind of “day after tomorrow” where we’ve gotten our act together and learned how to live like human beings.  Well, I’ll let Jake Barter work on that for a while.

Thanksgiving 2025

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Tomorrow is Camera Girl’s D-Day.  The family comes over for a twenty-six-pound turkey and all the trimmings.  I counted up the individual food courses and it came close to thirty.  So, this is ridiculous and I asked her if she wants to start cutting back on all this preparation or get the daughters to help and she shook off the suggestion as heresy.  Apparently, she lives for this.  And I’m glad.  I think we all would miss something if she didn’t put this particular menu together in the traditional way that everyone in the family now looks at as the only way to have dinner on Thanksgiving.  The grandkids have never known a different menu at Thanksgiving and that’s going back over twenty years for some of them.  All in all, that’s an amazing track record.

Of course, one day things will change.  One day the grandkids will start families of their own.  And they won’t be able to come to our house every year.  Or maybe we’ll just get too old to run Thanksgiving.  But for now, we live in that golden era where all the grandkids think this regime is eternal.  And I’ll let that be the party line.

Tomorrow we’ll gather for the feast and sit down at 2pm.  I’ll have the honor (!?!) of carving the turkey and sitting at the head of the table as pater familias but all the power is vested in Camera Girl as boss of the kitchen.  She will be scurrying around making sure that the various dishes are available to people at all sections of the table (or tables, the crowd spills over onto a couple of smaller tables added onto the main table) and truth be told I don’t think she even eats a mouthful of food for the first forty minutes of the campaign.  But once the table is completely stocked and everyone has filled their plates for the first time she will settle into her seat and stay there until dessert is needed.  And this will be an assortment of home-made pies and other desserts.  The only thing I always insist on is the availability of several gallons of good quality vanilla ice cream.  Inevitably there will be several other flavors represented; chocolate chip, strawberry, even heretical flavors like cookies and cream.  But for me the gold standard is vanilla.  It is a pure element, possibly the quintessence of the Thanksgiving dessert.  And my grandchildren agree with me vehemently.  There was an open revolt one year when vanilla ice cream wasn’t clearly visible on the dessert table.  I joined in their cries of protest and Camera Girl was forced to head into the basement to the back of the freezer where the vanilla was hiding.  Since then, there’s been no more nonsense about it.

And after we’ve stuffed ourselves with turkey and fixings and dessert, the grandsons and I will head into the living room to watch our holiday movies.  Typically, we’ll bust out the Laurel and Hardy version of “March of the Wooden Soldiers.”  Afterwards I’ll try to put on one of the versions of “A Christmas Carol.”  I think they feel that the Alistair Sim version is definitive.  But we’ll see.

So, the site may be kind of quiet tomorrow but it’s for a good cause.  Happy Thanksgiving to all you folks out there.  Enjoy the day.

Too Soon for Cabin Fever

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Too many irons in the fire.  More and more “stuff” dumped in front of me to trip over.  Boredom, frustration, ennui, blah, blah, blah.  Okay, whatever.

So, I’m trying to concentrate on the important stuff.  I got my cover artist signed up.  He needs some information from me and I’m working to answer the questions.  I’m still waiting for some answers from the experts on small stuff and big stuff that has to be decided (when, how and how much).

And I’m looking to sell off a bunch of lenses I don’t use much and exchange them for that new 100mm f/2.8 macro lens from Sony.  It’ll be good to move out a bunch of stuff that’s just sitting around and concentrate on what I like to play around with.  I’ll probably also buy a macro rail and maybe some doo-dads that will let me experiment with tilt shift and other technical adjustments.  I was watching a video from a guy in England who does a lot of product work.  You know, pictures of corn flakes boxes and shampoo bottles.  He was demonstrating his technical camera.  It’s a digital “back” attached to a bellows with a lens on the other side attached to a support that allowed for all kinds of motion for the lens; tilt and shift and any kind of motion relative to the digital back.  In addition, the digital back can tilt and shift also.  This allows the image formed by the lens to strike the sensor either straight on or at any angle desired.  Now I think this is really great.  I’d love to have this capability.  But the numbers being thrown around for a medium format digital back and the other components runs into the tens of thousands of dollars (well, pounds for that Brit).

But it occurred to me that with a little ingenuity and a slight downgrade in kit (e.g., a full frame camera like my Sony A7IV instead of a medium format back) I might be able to get almost the same effects for very short money.  And since the winter is beginning to bite into my soul (we had the first noticeable snow cover this morning) this would be a marvelous time to distract myself from the realities of Dunwich in the winter.

Tuesday and Wednesday will be boring work days.  Saturday is another family party (great!).  A week from Tuesday will be a day of tedium not to be imagined and then Thursday is Thanksgiving.  I guess you must take the good with the bad.  But I’m not very patient.  Camera Girl is much better at that sort of thing.  She was raised to be hard-working and dependable.  I, on the other hand, am lazy, easily bored and unreliable.  I like to think this is because I am like my idol; Wiley Coyote, a super genius.  I like the way that sounds, WILEY COYOTE, SUPER GENIUS!!!!!!

I’d better cut this short.  It’s becoming too much like me talking to myself and that’s not healthy for anyone.  It’s too close to the scene where Wendy Torrance starts reading the manuscript that Jack has been working on and finds that it’s hundreds of pages of text that consists of variations on the sentence, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”  It’s just too early in the winter to start getting cabin fever.

Oh, Woe is Me

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My life is already getting hectic again.  I’m working on getting my book cover drawn and I think I’ve found the artist.  He’s a fellow in France and his drawings are very skillful and artistic.  Much better than I need but I think it makes sense to have a talented person handling something that I’m completely unqualified to do.  My concept is a black and white sketch of a sniper on a rooftop aiming down at an antifa riot where one rioter in black bloc is getting ready to knife a business owner trying to protect his storefront from the rioters.  It’s basically a scene from the book.

Of course, not being someone who can draw I don’t have a feel for the sense of perspective and how that would affect the relative sizes of the several figures in the scene.  That probably will dictate where the vantage point of the viewer should be.  But that’s why I want someone skilled working out those kinds of questions.

And suddenly there are all kinds of details I’m thinking about.  Is launching a book before, during or after the Christmas shopping season the best time for an independent author?  Should I explicitly sub-title the book as a series?  And what about my nom de plume?  I’ve come up with a few names and they seem to break into two groups; rugged or literary.  As an example, compare Jack Fader versus Julian Lesage.  So many details, so little attention span.

So I’m busy with all of this stuff but the day job is being super annoying just when I thought it would be giving me a break.  Oh, the pain, the pain.  And simultaneously, the family holidays are coming up so I have to help Camera Girl prepare for the festivities.  So, this week I’ve been cleaning up the yard and putting stuff away and winterproofing the vulnerable areas of the Compound.  And every year that list grows.  I noticed today that a small back gate to one of the fences was blown right off its hinges by a windstorm this week.  I knew it was weakened but I thought it would last a little while longer.  But now I’ve got to do something permanent about it.

And this morning I’m sitting with Camera Girl in the dining room and looking out on a screened in porch I see some kind of medium sized bird fluttering around in the porch.  The wind blew open the magnetized doorway of the curtain just long enough for the bird to find its way in but not long enough for it to escape so I had to go to its rescue.  I arranged for its escape but did I get even a thank you from the ungrateful avian?  Nope.  Not even a friendly chirp.  But going out there brought to my attention just how much dust and dirt had built up on the deck.  There are whole areas of this place that I don’t set foot in for seasons at a time.  I do live in a very strange and inefficient place.

Well, now that I’ve complained about the problems I’m surrounded by and shared them with you, I feel a little better.

It’s a Lousy Job, But…

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The Dunwich Autumnal Zombie-fest officially ended yesterday at 4pm when I and the other town officials who conduct this marathon nightmare put out the flames that we use to cremate the zombies.  It’s a really exhausting process.  We spend two weeks excavating a forty-foot deep 100 yard in diameter hole and then the guy who loses a series of card cuts has to sit all night in a cage suspended over the pit to lure the zombies into falling into the hole.  It’s a really disgusting job because the zombies smell awful.  Well, you guessed it.  I was the lure.  It’s such a long two nights.  But eventually the sun came up on Wednesday and I climbed along the boom of the crane and down the mast to the side of the pit and flooded the zombie-infested hole with diesel oil, topped it off with some gasoline, stepped back a good way and threw in a road flare.  It’s an interesting spectacle.  I don’t think they can feel pain so they just keep walking around in the inferno until they they’ve been thoroughly cooked.  By 4pm there was nothing left but bones and we bulldozed the soil back in again.

But it takes a couple of hot showers and a really good night’s sleep to feel normal again.  Listening to them moan sends shivers down your spine and at some point, they began trying to form a pyramid to reach me.  They never come close but it’s unnerving to watch them try.  And a few really smart and coordinated zombies climb up the crane.  I keep a bunch of long poles in the cage and when I’m sick of looking at them I push them off the boom into the pit.

I really need to find a better gig but it does pay rather well for a couple of weeks’ worth of work.  Plus, I get to see some old familiar faces one last time before recycling them for good.  Toward the end of the night, I saw a guy who had been driving behind me a few weeks ago.  It was four o-clock in the morning and the one light in Dunwich was in its blinking yellow mode.  So, I stopped to check the intersection for oncoming traffic and this guy starts laying on his horn and flashing his brights.  Then he almost side swiped me when passing me and drove off at about thirty miles an hour faster than the speed limit.  I’m guessing he must have ended up hitting a pole or boulder and the zombies must have come by and munched him before anyone found him.

Well, I flipped him off from inside the cage and then knocked him into the pit.  It might have been my imagination but it seemed like after he got up, he was shoving and bumping the other zombies in the pit quite a bit.  Well, old habits die hard they say.  I have to confess I was smiling while I watched him roasting in the pit.  Well, every job has its points.

Camera Girl’s Seal of Approval

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For the last couple of weeks Camera Girl has been asking me to send her a copy of my book.  And I kept forgetting.  Now, she’s not the most tech savvy individual.  So, reading a book from her laptop isn’t ideal for her.  But a few days ago she finally figured out how to open the file I e-mailed her and began reading it.  Somehow yesterday she informed me that the last twenty pages of the book were missing.  This panicked me because I had sent her the same file I sent to all of the other readers and I was afraid everyone would think I was losing my mind and forgot to finish the book.  But on examining her copy I could see those last twenty pages.  Somehow, she had a second copy open and something screwy happened to it.

Well, the good news is she likes the book.  And this cheered me up quite a bit.  Firstly, because I think she really means it.  She is a very honest woman and even taking into account her bias in my favor, her positive comments were recognizable facets of the story.  Secondly, I’m encouraged because this gives me my first test sample for women readers.  And Camera Girl is a voracious reader of thrillers.  She’s always reading a Lee Child book or some other big author in the genre.  And she’s not a science fiction reader so if the other aspects of the book appeal to her it makes me think my story will have general appeal, possibly even with women!

And I’ll have to say that shocks me.  I would say that my reading and writing preferences are definitely pre-feminist.  The world at large currently is immersed in fiction that is geared for women readers almost exclusively.  Even male authors take into account the sensibilities and preferences of a female audience.  And to such an extent that men must notice that something has changed in these books.  So, I’m surprised that my writing style hasn’t triggered some alarm bells in Camera Girl’s fiction reading programming.  So, I think that’s interesting.

Of course, this has made me want to get some more female beta readers, but they’re hard to find in my circle of associates.  If any of you know of any women who are interested in this branch of fiction please let me know and I’ll send along a copy for her.  The trick is to find women who wouldn’t be politically triggered by the right-wing nature of the plot and characters.

Of course, Camera Girl still has twenty pages to go so there’s no guarantee that she won’t hate the ending.  But one positive sign is that a scene in the book sparked her desire to bake a crumb cake today.  And as much as I’m on a diet I saw it as a positive sign for her ultimate seal of approval on the book.  So far, she says her favorite scene in the book is when Chastain is being pressured to accept becoming the next President of the United States by the remaining upper echelons of the federal government (Supreme Court Justices, highest ranking military officers, etc.) and he tells them he has to call his wife first to get her advice.

Well, I hope she likes it.  I’m depending on getting her recommendation on the back cover.

The Sourest of Grapes

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Today I heard an hilarious argument as to why it is cheaper to live in New England than in the South.  The main points of the thesis are that the infrastructure and services available here more than make up for the exorbitant cost of living.  So, for instance, whereas the cost of owning a car in New England (insurance, mechanic’s charges, taxes) are much higher, because the roads are so much better your car will last much longer.  When I heard this, I was thinking about what road salt does to the frame of a car in New England every winter.  And then I thought about my recent drive on I-95 and the craters there that I drove over.

Next up was the world class medical care available in this region of the country and nowhere else.  Now, it is without a doubt true that some very fine doctors and hospitals exist in places like Boston.  But it is also true that there are plenty of really mediocre medical centers and even terrible ones up here.  And I have experienced both so I’m not sure I believe that this is a slam dunk.  I guess if your health is extremely poor this might carry some weight but I have heard of good hospitals sprinkled around the country and in addition if someone is in desperate need of specialized care like a knee replacement or something I’m guessing you could travel for the procedure.  So, let’s call this a 50/50.

But the final point was the best.  The overarching reason to live in New England is “the culture.”  That one I think made me snort out loud.  Apparently going into Boston or New York City to see “Hamilton” or some other masterpiece of middle-brow pomposity is supposed to make up for ridiculous real estate prices, outrageous utility and fuel bills, failing schools and colleges and an, in general, overregulated existence.  And once you add the prevalence of increasing violence and squalor in the urban centers to the equation what exactly is there to extol about this region of the country?

But the participants in this New England pep rally nodded their heads and agreed that no sane individual would even think of packing it in, selling off the family home and buying a bigger house for half the price in a place where you can walk around in February in a light jacket and snow is an oddity that you hear about in stories about Santa Claus.

Well, I guess heaven (or hell) is where you make it.  I will admit that we’ve had a beautiful fall with balmy weather extending almost all the way to Halloween.  But eventually you have to pay the piper and the wind has been blowing pretty hard and the leaves have been stripped from a lot of the trees (except the oaks).  So even these people making believe they live in a wonderland know the awful truth.  After Christmas is over, the really awful stuff will begin.  Even with the milder winters we’ve been having, there are four months of bleak, cold weather waiting for us; January, February, March and April.  That’s a bitter pill.