Leap-Day Monday Musings

What a month. I’m actually glad we got an extra day for February. I can’t articulate a rational reason for this—it’s just a day we’ve slapped an arbitrary number and name to—but I’m glad, and that’s a good emotion for a Monday.

Apropos of not much, I don’t recall there being a big deal about Leap Day four years ago when it last rolled around. What the hell. About time we exploited the occasion for a hashtag. I’ll accept any excuse for a party.

What a month, though. In Colorado Springs, we kicked it off with the kind of high-volume snowstorm no one’s seen around here since the same time in 2007. The road outside my house was slush for a week. 

Then the Broncos beat the odds and won a Super Bowl that surprised me by actually dialing back on the overall hype, despite this being its golden anniversary. It’s hard to believe that was three weeks ago. 

That the month quickly warmed up with many days in the 50s and 60sF helped a lot in this regard. It was an unnatural state of affairs for this area at this time of year, and I shudder to think what this means for the summer to come. Still, I was able to get out and walk and run in comfort, and that did a lot to help with the ol’ seasonal blues.

For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to do the taxes,. though. I set aside weekend after weekend until last Friday night, the last Friday of the month, when I could stand it no more. I could justify the procrastination inasmuch as working with TurboTax is a pain in the ass that takes twice as long to do for all the “Are you sure you don’t want to pay a pile of money for all these features an impecunious nobody like you would never need?” screens that slow the process.

Still, we needed that refund, and it turned out to be larger than I thought it would be. As I had to engage directly with the Colorado Department of Revenue’s breathtakingly cluttered and inelegant website, I saved the state taxes for Saturday. I knocked out my grown daughter’s federal and state taxes yesterday, and told her the fee for next year’s accounting services are going up from a 12-pack of beer to a case next year. We’re all getting too old for this shit.

With that out of the way, I’m free to do all the things I should have been doing all along, but haven’t quite worked up the nerve to do. 

The Wrong Kind of Dead is still in re-fit to accommodate the big scenes that will bring the novel to its climax and close. It’s a lot of work bringing this together with the other two books, and making it all work, especially as these are my first books, and I was a completely different writer for each one of the years I’ve devoted to those individual books. I consider myself a competent enough writer, but I’m still not sure that, after all these decades of bashing things out, I have an actual voice, a recognizable style.

There is no time to fuss over that, though. I’ve got to write and post this before the day is up in this hemisphere. And then there are the promotional podcasts and trailers to make.

Okay, I’ve talked myself into it.

Happy Leap Day, and Happy New Month! February was a the best so far for me in terms of blog visits, book sales, and Twitter impressions. Even my weight loss program, however halt and lame, is on track. I’m not quite over the top yet, though. March might be the month everything breaks big, if I can only meet it halfway.

Meet you at the summit.

Happy 99th Birthday, Anthony Burgess

25 February 1917 - 22 November 1993

I normally hold novels with gimmicky language in contempt, but Anthony Burgess made his Russian-inspired patois in A Clockwork Orange such jolly dark fun to read. God help me, there was a brief period in 1982 after I first read the book in which I’d actually talk like this to people. Like I said, it was a brief period. It was horrorshow in the more literal sense of the English portmanteau than a clever homophone for the Russian word for “good.”

From Weirdbook Magazine’s Facebook page. They’re on a hot streak with the memes and creepy art this week.

As someone who’s written a few disturbing scenes for novels, I love the legend about Anthony Burgess presumably staying drunk while writing the A Clockwork Orange because it was the only way he could handle the grim material. If it’s not true—who cares, print the legend!

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that A Clockwork Orange is merely the most popular and well-known of Anthony Burgess’ varied and vast career, not only as a prolific novelist and critic, but as a composer. You can look it up. For another dark speculative fiction novel of Burgess’ that seems most prescient given our media’s obsession with certain fads and how those are used to control a population’s focus of attention, I recommend The Wanting Seed.

REVEALED AT LAST! Where the Ideas Come From

Number 7 gave me explosive diarrhea!

Readers of Kurt Vonnegut recognize the drawing
and handwriting style immediately.

Like anyone familiar with history who spends too much time thinking by himself, I, too, nurture a healthy loathing for what Mark Twain referred to in his final, most misanthropic days as, “the Damned Human Race.” While such loathing inspires much of my SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER series, as it must inform any good post-apocalyptic drama, disgust with human civilization is not what drives my writing.

It took decades of writing all kinds of other crap until, somewhere while writing my first published novel, Bleeding Kansas, that I understood where my drive to make up stories comes from.

I did not get enough quality play time as child.

Like most children, I liked to play. Unlike most children, I didn’t enjoy the company of other children. I liked being surrounded by my toys, and directing the drama without interference. I built towns out of shoeboxes and used whatever was at hand—set ‘em up, knock ‘em down. The hero rises from the wreckage and boom! bam! pow! restores order to the universe.

I would use model spaceships, half-finished models of airplanes, rubber lizards and snakes, whatever it took to drive the narrative to a crescendo of madness only a hero with a will of steel and a heart of gold could hope to overcome. For me, the best representation of the creative process has always been the opening scene of the 1995 animated film Toy Story.

[EDIT: I had a video of that here. YouTube took it down. Oh, well. Go stream the film if you haven’t already.]

In a variation on the growth-through-struggle theme, once the conflict was resolved, my rebuilt city was always somehow better than ever. This part was especially important to me, not simply for the closure, but because I felt bad for what I put the imaginary characters in my stories through. It was my way of making it up to them.

Alas, I was not a complete freak. I did get lonely. Often, whether I wanted it or not, I would find myself among others who always had to do things this way or that, and while I went along to get along, it was never very satisfying. Not that I was a lot of fun, either. I’ve always been moved by George Orwell’s honesty in his essay “Why I Write,” that, being a lonely sort, he’d “...developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my school days.” That was me. Not even a complete freak, but close enough for government work.

As I was coming out of a particularly productive writing session, I flashed on something else other than the little boy in the middle of the floor, making gurgly explosive noises among the little army men and the giant lizard. I thought of my favorite Christmas memory, the one that gives me the warmest-fuzziest of feels.

I’m 12 years old, hunched over my desk in my room, the smells of turpentine and modeling glue stinging my nose. The radio plays the current hits of December 1973, while I make sense of this Pirates of the Caribbean model involving moving parts that I found under the tree this morning. In this case, I have to to be able to push a button and make a skeleton pirate with a sword cut a chain over a barrel so another skeleton can make good his escape from the giant octopus swamping their raft.

As with most cherished childhood things
I have no idea what happened to this.

Thanks to the turpentine I’ve been using for paint thinner, the raft looks like genuinely sun-bleached driftwood. I can’t believe I made simple white Polystyrene plastic look like this. The barrel looks like a fresher, different kind of wood—in short, like a wooden barrel, and I’m pleased with myself for recognizing the difference. The giant octopus is a hideous, fleshy and inflamed pink-red, and my skeletons are looking sharp for a couple of dead guys in rags. But will the skeleton’s sword come down to disconnect the plastic chain and save the day?

I remember sitting there astonished when it worked that first time. I remember the deep breath I took as I set it up. Surely it couldn’t work a second time. I have no talent for this, or so I’ve been told in one form or another all my life.

It was the happiest Christmas ever for me as a boy. I had given and received the best gift ever. That I could build something and make it work—as someone who heard all his childhood how “you got book-sense, but no common sense,” this was the epiphany of epiphanies. No adult ever encouraged me. I found this one out all on my lonesome.

And so it is when I work on a piece of writing. I’m getting the pieces painted just so. And when I push this tiny button here, a specific chain of events must follow, or I swear I’ll have a fit.

Things don’t always work to spec, of course. Sometimes you have to improvise. Adapt and overcome, as our friends in the U.S. Marines say.

The happiest place on Earth. In the corner of a small
room in a finished basement, somewhere in
crumbling north Colorado Springs.

But that’s the romance of the process. That’s what inspires me as much as anything. The very act of sitting down and building a world, creating a situation within that world, and making it work. To build a hero, flawed enough to recognize his face within ourselves, but with the steel will and heart of gold to go against the Evil and make things right—this little boy didn’t get to do it enough. There was never enough time. People and things got in the way, as they tend to do.

So here we are. One day I’ll grow up and give it up, I suppose. I expect I’ll be plenty old, and good and ready to die by then, and that’s just as well, too.

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Pure Pop for Now People ca. A.D. 2016: Tame Impala’s “Disciples”

It’s past time I brought some music back to this blog.

My son performed a miracle this week. He introduced me to a tune written and recorded in the past couple of years that I cannot get enough of. Like the best of everything I encounter these days, Tame Impala’s “Disciples” has a retro feel. It’s easy to imagine discovering this on the radio in the mid-1970s while lazily turning the AM radio dial late at night, when you could get the good out-of-state stations with the DJs that played the really cool stuff those evil, unseen Powers That Be preferred you didn’t hear.

James was impressed by how much feeling was put into one minute and 48 seconds of music, as was I. “When I first heard this and it started fading out I screamed NO!” he said. “Don’t take this beautiful thing away!” Like Jimi Hendrix’s original “Little Wing,” much of this song’s power is in its dreamlike brevity. It’s there, and then it isn’t, leaving a sweet ache of a memory behind. 


I love the plaintive So much I want to tell you right at the fade. But, as with the friendship mourned in the lyrics, the song is done. Nothing left but the memory of a melody you wish had stuck around for one more verse.

State of the Apocalypse, Halfway Through the Second Month

We’ve gone from being buried in snow to stretches of days with high temperatures in the 50s and 60sF (10-15C). With the occasional windstorm thrown in, spring appears to have arrived one month early to Colorado Springs. If the long-range forecasts are correct, the nose-numbing deep freeze stuff is behind us.

Aside from the benefit of lowered utility bills, our preternatural spring adds to the urgency of finishing The Wrong Kind of Dead. I’m coming up on the three year anniversary of that fateful e-mail I received from Severed Press and THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER had a publishing contract.It would be nice to be closer to finishing, if not done outright.

To that end, I’ve devised a plan to bring the entire series together tonally, applying all the lessons I’ve learned in the four years I’ve been banging away at my evolving saga. I’ll be fixing the rookie errors and polishing each book to read consistently with one another, as opposed to segments of a beginning novelist’s learning curve.

If it works, I’ll tell you all about it. Meanwhile....

The view from the picture window two weeks ago today. It’s all gone now. Which means I have to get out and rake the yard. Dammit.

FYI: The next installment I’m running from The Wrong Kind of Dead will be a chapter I’ve posted before. This post puts it in the continuity. In case anyone’s wondering, that is.

I’ll be posting only one chapter per week from here on out, as each of the chapters coming up has action and grue to hold us. Some of those chapters are so good I put them up on the blog immediately upon finishing them. So it’s not deja vu. I’m merely getting it all together.

If you haven’t read the first 70-something pages of my latest zombie apocalypse novel-in-progress, start here and follow the links at the bottom of the page to go chapter by chapter (or partial chapter by partial chapter, in the case of Chapter 5). And, of course, there are the first two books in the series available in Kindle and paperback. 

Just sayin’. I’ve got to get to work.

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Overexposed Cats on the Internet

It gets cold in winter, too. Find your place in the sun!

I was coming up the stairs from my basement HQ on Sunday when, as my line of sight rose above the hall landing, I beheld the baleful stares of the Four Fluffies of the Apocalypse™. I backed slowly down the stairs—and grabbed my camera from my desk drawer before creeping back up.

Bless them, they were still staring. Bask in the cold glare of their judgment:

From left: Jack, Mick, Otis, and Puff instruct us all on how to properly appreciate a sunny day.

They don’t give a rip for who wins the Super Bowl, the primaries, the Powerball lottery, the Billboard charts, the Oscars, none of it. As the Great Bukowski observed, one look into a cat’s eyes tells you everything you need to know.

In this case, they’re telling me they are aware of my presence, with intention of following me into the kitchen where they will harass me without mercy until I sprinkle some token kibble into their bowls, just enough to ensure my escape back down the stairs with my coffee.

It is a pretty day, though, isn’t it?

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Hot XXX Food Porn and What Happens Next

I never thought I’d see the day I’d write so much about football. It’s weird, because I didn’t care at all for sports when I was growing up, even when I played football in high school. My interest in college and pro ball is a mutation of my late middle age. Like a mental skin-tag.

All of this is to say how appalled I am to notice this, and I will cease and desist. Until next season, that is, or something catches my attention.

Hey, but we all like food, right? My wife makes a Super Bowl spread to beat the band. Check out these jalapeño poppers:

Behold crispy green longboats filled with molten cheesy goodness, standing by to transport us to a delirium of spicy-hot caloric overindulgence. My wife wrapped these in bacon for Super Bowl XLIV, and it seemed like overkill. That’s how good these things are.

My wife and I have agreed that if the Super Bowl becomes too intolerable, we’ll repurpose the occasion as Jalapeño Poppers Sunday, keep the food, and watch a movie. It makes for a good fallback plan should the match-up in any given year prove unacceptable.

Vegetarian nachos. What the hell, they work, and are darned photogenic, besides.

In other news, I managed to get the entire first act of my third zombie novel up before getting distracted by all this Super Bowl jazz. Cursory readings as I formatted the posts revealed the trimming I need to do, as well as the augmentation I’ll want to to write in lieu of reinforcing the starting and ending bases of my character arcs. 

What does this mean? Nothing, except I gotta get back to work. One of the reasons I put the chapters up was to see what they looked like in public. Now I know. It ain’t bad, but it damn sure can be better. So that’s what we’ll do.

Chicken wings and spring rolls. Oh, baby...oh puppymonkeybaby....

I have to consciously not use this trimming and augmentation as an excuse to avoid writing this chapter I’ve been dreading for over a year. It’s about to get really, really dark with The Wrong Kind of Dead’s Darkest Hour. That’s all I can say about it.

Meanwhile, cheers and thanks to all of my new Twitter friends, and especially to those of you snapping up the digital editions and even the occasional paperback of my first two books. Your very existence is inspirational—as in, I don’t want to piss you people off by slacking in the content department.

So. Let’s fast this foodbaby-bump off, and get down to business. Happy Mardi Gras. I’ll be in a state of indefinite Lent until I get this latest book finished.

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