Holding Down the Fort

Complaining and cat pictures. If this ain’t pure Internet, then I don’t know.

Yesterday I managed to make the opening bumper for my podcast, with music and super-reverbed title announcement. That, and a transitional bumper clip was as far as I got, though. Yeah, I know. I know. I need to tuck in and just do it.

Meanwhile, let’s check in with the local feline population while I talk to myself here.

A cat for every tree. After they take their afternoon kibble they like to play around the poplars.

This post-Christmas season has been harder than most, though I’m not sure how much of that has to do with the usual post-Christmas letdown blues. One would think that this being an unusually mild winter would have improved my mood. Instead, all I do is look at the clock as the sun sets and cheer a little bit for the extra minute of light we get versus the day before. Mild as it is, I’m done with this winter already. Bring on the long, warm days already.

It’s not just me, either. Lots of people are reporting feeling more irritable, depressed, and unmotivated to do anything. Something in the air? Who knows? It is what it is, and we’ve got to power through it.

Puff is holding a staring contest with...

...Angel, one of the two white cats we used to have around here. We never found out what happened to her sibling Boo. Angel has taken to sitting on the table by the door and looking inside.

We’re almost through the first month, though, and I have a feeling 2018 is going to be a very different, very transformational year.  Just a feeling, but my guts have rarely steered me wrong.

Whether these differences and transformations will be for good or ill, of course, depends on how I engage them.

It’s heart-rending to see the outdoor cats looking in at the fire in the wood pellet stove. Nine more cats (our core feral population) added to the five already inside would be untenable, however. Please feel free to drop some funds for kibble in my PayPal at upper right.If I had enough funds, I’d love to trap and spay and neuter all the ones outside. That’s down the road, though.

For me, the main issue is getting up and engaging, period. So far, the plan is to get this post up and take a long walk outside. When I get back, I need to turn on the microphone, and just see where talking to myself takes me. It seems to have worked well enough here. It’s not as if the words are having trouble coming out. Might as well take advantage.

Everything Available On Demand But Desire

Musings on how we electronically entertain ourselves in the latter part of the second decade of the 21st century.

These 25” screen floor models were as good as it got
in the 1960s. My family had to settle for a 19” black-
and-white screen until 1974, when we traded up to a
color 19” screen. Still, whatever your station in life, if
you wanted to see the hot new show everyone was
talking about, you needed to have your backside
planted at the appointed time.

Something I’ve noticed when older folks talk about how media was consumed—or, as we called it, “watchin’ TV/goin’ to the movies”—is that, for all the usual cliches about how There Was Only Three Channels and PBS, et al., no one brings up how you couldn’t just watch “on demand,” as the surprisingly apt expression goes.

If you had a favorite show, you either made time to watch when it was broadcast, or you waited for the summer reruns. VCRs didn’t come down in price to be popular until the late 1970s. “Getting your kid to program the VCR for you” was a joke clear into the late 1980s, as interactive menus didn’t catch on with video recorder manufacturers until then. 

Until the release of Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989, you had to wait a year for the movie to go to video. It was a big deal that the film, released to theaters in late June, would be available for video purchase by Christmas. If a movie was popular enough, it would run in theaters for up to, and sometimes over a year. (This happened with 1973’s The Sting, a then-hugely popular comedy no one remembers anymore.) Tim Burton’s Batman changed that forever. Now, even the most popular films are out of the theaters within six weeks, and in a spinner rack in the supermarket shortly after.

Sometimes when my tinfoil hat is pinching, I’ll wonder
if the reason once-smash hit films like these aren’t
celebrated is because they would forcibly remind
audiences how insufferably weak today’s “stars”
and films are today.

One can go over this again and again—I have—and it’s still difficult to appreciate the enormity of how we’ve changed our habits as a mass-media consuming audience. 

Or maybe people are sick of hearing (or even remembering for themselves) when there were only three national broadcast networks plus the snowy-pictured PBS station, which your humble scribe does remember.  Nothing personal, Grandpa, but that story’s been told over and over again, so much so that it’s matched that half-century old (and still going strong sentiment), “I don’t own a TV” for tediousness.

I joined the “I don’t own a TV” crowd upon moving to the San Luis Valley in 2016.  There is no broadcast television whatsoever in this vast, slightly tilted flatland between the San Juan Mountains and the Sangre de Cristo range. We’re entirely dependent on the Amazon Fire Stick, and whatever we can bring in from the Internet through it.

As it turns out, this is all I’ll ever need. Or don’t, given that I hardly watch anything at all anymore. I can watch a decent variety of movies on my Prime account, but I simply cannot commit to putting my backside on that sofa cushion.

I often reflect how, as a boy, I would have been beside myself knowing I could watch any one of my favorite half-dozen Star Trek episodes whenever I wanted, instead of having to wait for them to come up in the syndication queue, and hoping I can get some uninterrupted quality time when the day and the hour rolls around. Yet I can’t even be bothered to sit and watch the things I actually like.

I don’t know if this is some depression-generated anhedonia or me getting cranky with old age or all of the above. It just is.

More Than Zombies: Landscapes and Poetry and Cats

Molly’s fingers touched his wrist. Very light, very soft. “Drew, maybe in the house there they’d spare us somethin’ to eat?”

A white line showed around his mouth. “Beggin’,” he said harshly. “Ain’t none of us ever begged before. Ain’t none of us ever goin’ to.”

Molly’s hand tightened on his wrist. He turned and saw her eyes. He saw the eyes of Susie and little Drew, looking at him. Slowly all the stiffness went out of his neck and his back. His face got loose and blank, shapeless like a thing that has been beaten too hard and too long. He got out of the car and went up the path to the house. He walked uncertainly, like a man who is sick, or nearly blind.

— Ray Bradbury (with an assist from Leigh Brackett),
“The Scythe,” The October Country

It’s not quite as dire as with the starving Okies in Bradbury’s tale quoted above, but I prefer not to wait until I’m forced to live out of my car.

Starting this Patreon is something I’ve been resisting for a long while. Even after deciding to do it, I’ve put off making the necessary videos to promote myself. It’s equal parts stage fright and simple mortification for having to do this in the first place. 

It's more than finishing the last book of Yet Another Zombie Apocalypse Series (of which mine is more than that, thank you). I’ve gotten positive responses to my photo essays, and would like to continue them, and with a proper DSLR, at that. I’ve been writing poems as a form of creative exercise and a way to vent emotions, and it turns out people want more of those, too.

A man’s gotta eat. Often at his desk, if he wants
to get anything done.

Meanwhile, there’s overhead, if not quite hell, to pay. A mortgage note, cats to feed, wood pellets and gas bills for the subzero days of winter ahead, et cetera and so on.

So, here we are. My ultimate goal is to build a cyber-oasis away from the usual angry drama in the media at large. If you like a bit of fictional ultraviolence, I’ve got a tab for my zombie novel excerpts. Otherwise, flowers and sunlight, old architecture and cats for days. (Trust me, with all the darkness I jam into my fiction, I need all the sunbeams and hollyhocks and tabbies I can get, with a side of food porn.)

Should I deem it necessary to write some terse lines about throwing away an old television or the shadows of the ants in late afternoon light, well, trust me. It beats arguing contemporary affairs, foreign or domestic. 

Of course, maybe that’s just me.

Let’s find out. Should you decide to support me, let me know what you want to see more of, and I’ll do what I can to make sure you get it.

If you’re not sure you want to commit to a monthly thing, but if you feel up to buying me a beer or six, there’s always the PayPal tab, too. Every bit is appreciated.

State of the Apocalypse, Mid-January 2018: What’s Happening with THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER

Number 8 will cause severe gastrointestinal distress! Or something.

This story is good for two, maybe three podcast episodes, so I can’t give the whole thing away. Suffice it to say that, over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday season, I passed a major narrative milepost with my third book. With this major change in setting/venue comes a bit of world-building I need to square away as quickly and unobtrusively as possible on my way to the narrative’s Darkest Hour.

Longtime readers of this blog will note I’ve made this announcement before, three, nearly four years ago. I’m unclear how I got slowed down so hard in 2015, except that the pressures to get our house in Colorado Springs ready for sale were making themselves known. I was coming back from my three-mile daily walks more and more depressed for the accelerating deterioration of the neighborhoods and parks, the crumbling and increasingly garbage-filled and graffiti’d aqueduct. 

If I were to look it up, I could pinpoint the exact date all writing on THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER stopped in early March 2016. That was the night after my Jeep got broken into at the once-upscale supermarket where my son worked. The thieves had pulled fuses from the fuse box with the apparent idea of disabling the vehicle. We’d leave it overnight in the parking lot; the thieves would come, reinstall the fuses, and collect a sweet, well-cared-for Jeep. 

Fortunately, the vehicle started and we managed to get it home. While my son and I fretted over getting replacement fuses and what appeared to be damage to the electricals in the steering column, my wife fell into severe pain that necessitated her being checked into the hospital.

In April, the busted up futon that pulled the room together from that right wall was taken apart and taken out by my wife. There were good reasons for doing this in regards to selling the house, but my office at Deep Haven Drive in Colorado Springs no longer felt like home.

I’ll never forget that moment I plopped down in my desk chair after visiting my wife at the hospital. I looked at the screen and I knew. An iron curtain had dropped inside my head. I no longer had access to that part of my brain that figured out how to write novels. 

I could spend another 3,000 words describing all that piled on throughout this depressed period, which included us moving 200 miles away from our grown children. As it turned out—and it pains me to confess this—I was lost in the psychic horse latitudes, dead in the water on finishing THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER for eleven straight months. 

That’s right. From near the beginning of March 2016 through the beginning of February 2017. Despite forcing out a few blogposts here and there, I had several panicky periods in which I wondered if I remembered how to write at all.

It would take more than 3,000 words to describe how I broke the spell, undertaking one chapter per day rewrites of Bleeding Kansas and Grace Among the Dead, and rewriting, re-plotting, re-everything redux though The Wrong Kind of Dead to the point I’m at now. 

It’s mid-January already, though, and there are few more things to be done. That is, aside from getting to this Darkest Hour, and resolving a three novel series that’s been growing and kicking around two different hard drives since 4 November 2011.

Never mind that. Let’s get to the good stuff. What’s the new book about?

Directly beneath the Great Wall of Bukowski lies the 2017 yet-to-be-released digital remasters of my first two books, and what there is of the galleys for Book 3.

A year has passed since the fall of civilization in The Wrong Kind of Dead, and through a series of fortunate/unfortunate events, Derek Grace and his people learn where the elites disappeared to when the dead rose to eat the living.

In an effort at post-nationalism, the surviving elites call their confederation of remote rural redoubts the Network. The outside world where the dead roam is the Wilderness. The people in the Network entertain themselves with narrated drone-cam footage of survivors struggling and fighting in the Wilderness, which is how Derek Grace and his people come to Jackson Redoubt in Wyoming.

As aficionados of the genre know, there is no such thing as safety in the zombie post-apocalypse. Reunited with Dr. Clyde Hearn from Bleeding Kansas, Grace learns that the colonies of flesh-eating bacteria animating the dead are evolving. They’ve developed hierarchy, with the smart ones at top learning not only how to find living meat, but how to husband it. It turns out there are living people who work with the upper level dead to manage other living captives for food as at least one millions-strong horde they know of travels.

How did such a system come to be? Moreover, how can this horde know how to head for the Redoubt? How is Derek Grace going to save his family, when movement outside the Redoubts is restricted by armed perimeter drones? They’re caught between the pincers of a capricious totalitarian society and sheer numbers of increasingly clever, evolving dead which threaten to overwhelm all.

Well, that was a lot more fun than talking about my stupid personal problems. I haven’t even gotten to the rogue colonel, what we learn of the fate of the rest of the planet, etc.

I’ll have to save it for the podcasts. When I get the  nerve to do them, that is. Which has to be soon, because it’s Patreon or bust for the old man here. Gotta get that ancillary content going.

Personal problems, again. Feel free to hit my PayPal while I work through this.

The Nigh-Insuperable Challenges of an Ordinary Season

The last of the lights come down today.

That was it. It’s gone. The last holiday of the Holiday Season that everyone says “Happy Holidays” for. With no entertaining nor entertainment required, New Year’s Day is a slightly less awkward holiday than Christmas. Indeed, I think the holiday exists primarily as a day of recovery from the night’s revels before. One might say it’s for recovering from the entire season, but I imagine Christmas feels like last year for many long before this point.

Once New Year’s Day is done, that’s it. That festive final third of the year that began with Labor Day/Back to School is over. Nothing to look forward to from here but for the warm weather to return.

At least the days are getting longer, 43 seconds to one minute at a time. Oh, yeah, I’m keeping track.

January and February are a long stretch of gray, frigid nothing, with only the much-resented Valentine’s Day to mark the calendar. After that it’s, what, St. Patrick’s Day? Easter at least announces the warm weather. Still, it doesn’t seem like U.S. popular culture is feeling its oats until Memorial Day Weekend, when summer unofficially begins.

It’s easy to make those proclamations and resolutions when the season and the days feel bigger than they do now. And it’s easy to see how they fall away in the charmless, colorless days of the long winter that follows.

This is exactly the point of it all. If character is what you are in the dark, or when you think no one is looking, then...well, there’s a similar theme I’m reaching for. Again, there is nothing special about this part of the year. It’s just you and the general pointlessness of existence that was eclipsed by four months of football, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Until yesterday.

This is the season in which we separate the doers from the talkers. The serious operators from the validation seekers.

No lights, no decorations, no songs. No excuses, either. Darn it.

I have to choose a side, too. Every day. Some days will be  easier than others, which is funny, because they’ll all look the same from here until the end of February. 

It’s the lights inside of us that color these days. If we could only get those Christmas lights back up where and when they really count....

A Toast to What’s Next

Two months ago already.

The season started for us two days after Halloween when I learned my good friend and brother of another mother Steven was in the hospital, his organs failing. It’s just as well I didn’t make it to the memorial service because we all fell sick with an intestinal flu that knocked us out for most of Thanksgiving week.

I was going to write at length about this. If you’re a fan of my zombie novels, Steven was the one who forced me to lay a solid narrative foundation in terms of the pseudo-science and humanizing Derek Grace in the very first chapter by having him talk to the cab driver. (Grace still came off as prickly, but at least you knew who you were dealing with, and what motivated him.) 

The tagline to the release of the remastered Bleeding Kansas and Grace Among the Dead (“rewrites” seems too quaint for that project) along with the release to the final chapter, The Wrong Kind of Dead is “Robert Heinlein and Harlan Ellison walk into a bar with their portable typewriters to bang out the Ultimate Zombie Post-Apocalypse Adventure.” It’s a great tagline that reflects the approach I’ve set from the beginning, but it doesn’t precisely describe Steven and me. Steven was a huge fan of Heinlein, but wasn’t all that rational all the time. As for me, and just for starters, I wouldn’t be ordering club sodas in that bar like the famously tee-totaling Ellison. It’s close enough for a decent thumbnail image, though, and all anyone outside our rarefied circle needs to know.

My Ellison shelf. Not all I own, but the essentials are here.

The Long November of 2017 seems like 20 years ago already. The lessons have been long since taken. Christmas was enriched by the reminder that any time is plenty old enough to die, and if others aren’t here, you still are, so it behooves you to make something of it. It was a great time with all the family under our roof. So the time will come when there’s an empty chair at the table. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

I think of that line from Ecclesiastes, It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart. There’s no arguing this except to say I’ve done my mourning. I’ve taken all I can stand to heart. Let’s get something to eat.

So what’s ahead? What am I toasting?

Silent evening, shortly before sundown on Christmas Eve in Monte Vista, Colorado. “All anguish, pain, and sadness/Leave your heart, and may your road be clear.”

I toast the month I hope to make my first podcasts. I’ve been talking about this for years. Now it’s time to begin singing for my supper, as I’m too old and weird to work a regular job. I’m also too close to finishing The Wrong Kind of Dead. As always, I can’t predict when I’ll finish it, but at this point I’m confident I can say, “Before summer.” Well before, if I stay on track. Steven will get his dedication page, and I will be done with a series I started writing in 2011, and should have finished two and a half years ago already.

I’ll be taking things a week at a time, and I pledge to be careful not to let the days get away from me. I wish myself, and by extension, you, Dear Reader, not so much a Happy New Year, but a positive and focused one. If I can just get these few things done, the happiness will follow.

Thanks to each and every one of you who has read and enjoyed this blog. Oh, and that person you’re close to, but haven’t spoken with in so long because, well, everyone’s busy? This is the time to check in. This week. Do it.

That kid on the lower right looks like he’s rockin’ the right attitude. Happy 2018.