Music

L. to R.: Dana, Maya, Ian, Jason

Ian Young, the guy who plays mandolin and sometimes guitar in our weekly jam session, is involved in a couple other groups, one of which is called Vox Swifts. There are four of 'em -- Ian, Dana Wendel, Maya Rowland, and Jason Everly. As it happens, they will be playing tonight at the Alberta Street Pub in Portland, Oregon, at 8 p.m. If you are bopping around town with nothing to do, check 'em out. 


Old Tyme Musick ...

Small Medium at Large

Got an email from Mark Kilbane, my producer for the theoretical movie of TMWNM. He's at a big to-do film festival thingee in Hong Kong, hustling, and give the man credit, he is busting his balls to get something off the ground. Got a director attached if funding arrives, and that helps sell the project. In Hollywood, it's all pie-in-the-sky until the check clears, and not until you see it on the silver screen is the deal totally done, but forward motion is better than not.


I told him to break a leg ...


In theatrical circles, there are a  number of superstitions, and the two that stand out the most for me involve luck. Not that I'm all that conversant with the theater–I haven't trodden the boards since high school, but I have been peripherally involved via TV and assorted spec movie scripts. What I know is, it is considered bad luck to wish somebody good luck on a new show. To offset this, you instead wish them ill, with the notion being that bored gods looking for mischief will do the opposite, so that will portend good. Thus, "Break a leg."


The other superstition concerns the play Macbeth. It is considered a cursed play, going back to long-past performances where bad things happened. The story is that in the very first production, somebody used a real knife instead of a fake, and an actor was killed. Or that the witches doing the toil-and-trouble curse were actually offering real curses. Whatever. Quoting from the play outside a rehearsal or performance, or even mentioning its name is considered a bad idea, so it's usually referred to as "The Scottish Play," when spoken of it must be, especially inside a theater proper.


So, now you know if you didn't before. Use this knowledge wisely. 

Hockey, Eh?

I'm not a hockey fan. We didn't have ice skating in Louisiana when I was a boy. Somebody eventually did get around to opening a rink there when I was in my teens, but it was the only one in town, and the ponds and swamps seldom froze solid enough to skate upon. Maybe twice I can remember, and then only for a few days, so it wasn't an activity anybody was going to do. I found I was able to transfer some of my roller skating skills to ice, but it was harder, and colder when you fell. 


Ice skating in Louisiana. Kind of like the Jamaican bobsled team. You know somebody was stoned when they thought that one up.


Um. Anyway, we do have a junior hockey league team in Portland, the Winterhawks, and they are good enough to have clinched the WHL championships in their division this year. 


There was another game after they got that, against Spokane, and my son got tickets for the company's private suite, so he took his two older boys and me last night.


The suite experience is not the same as the nosebleed seats. You get big screen TVs, there's a bar, a waitress comes around and takes food orders, all like that. You don't get to concentrate on the game as much, but since the only part I could follow was when one of the teams made a goal, that didn't matter much. You can get up and walk around, and they had the March Madness games on the TV, so people were watching that in the b.g.


The Hawks lost to the Chiefs, 6-3, but since it didn't really matter, save for pride, nobody was too disappointed.


It was an interesting experience, but there weren't any teeth knocked out, and it was a pretty clean game. Some shoving, a couple times a couple players wrestled a bit. Hard to fight on ice skates. Lot of guys went to the penalty box, which is how the Chiefs got six points.


The most fun was at half-time when they brought out two teams of nine-year-olds to play a three-minute game. That and the kiss-cam ...

Party Review

For those of you dying to know, our dinner party went well. House was clean, the new toilet seats–bamboo–were installed. The good wine flowed, mostly supplied by one of our guests, who knows from good wine. A dozen of us were drinking it, and we managed to hold consumption to a mere ten bottles. I had my share. The biggest advantage to having the party at your house? You don't have to drive home afterward, so you can do more than two glasses.

The shrimp and salmon were cooked well, if I do say so myself. I did the shrimp, my wife the salmon. I made cocktail sauce, she did tartar sauce, both with a bit of punch. Mine was pretty good; hers was better. 

The attendees supplied the sides, which ranged from rice and bread to salads and desserts, one of which was a kind of pound cake/coffee cake thing which made you gain weight just looking at it.

There was a make-your-own dessert bar, which included cake, chocolate, fruit, and various kinds of frozen sherberts, including blood orange. 

I spilled the Melita full of wet coffee grounds, the only disaster of the evening, but no harm, so no foul.

Once the food was eaten, we let the dogs in, and they behaved reasonably well. 

One of our friends brought preview copies of her new novel and passed them around, an unexpected treat.

One of the couples was enjoying their 57th wedding anniversary.

We started early, folks ran out of steam about midnight, and a fine time seemed to be had by all.

We mostly managed to avoid talking about how interesting the times have become. You know, war, famine, pestilence, death, like that. In case you have been doing your imitation of Patrick the starfish on Sponge Bob and living under a rock, all those things have been surging to the front of late. 

With any luck, by the time it rolls around to be our turn again, the times will have become less interesting ...

Party Looms - A Funny Thought about Roy

The dinner party is today, and after a week of preparation, we are almost ready. This is why we don't entertain more often–the prep-work is a killer. But the house is clean, we've combed the dogs, and I'm about to start boiling the shrimp; already made the cocktail sauce. 


Want my recipe? I tinker with it, but the current version is two parts ketchup to one part yellow mustard, with horse radish, lemon juice, and Tabasco sauce to taste. Simple, but sufficient.


Meanwhile, I finished Roy the Demon #8, "Disco Inferno," and as I was doing it acknowledged what kind of stories they are. 


In a short, you can concentrate on one of several things: plot, character, setting, mood. Hard to work all of them into four or five thousand words, so you decide going in which you want to serve. Mostly of my stuff has been about plot. Now and then, character. Roy's adventures are more vignettes–character and setting and mood. And while not exactly a precise term here, but one I like, they are ... demon a clef tales ...


And in case you are wondering how I visualize Roy, imagine the picture above with horns and fangs ...

Cleaning Frenzy

CUE THE SHARK'S THEME FROM JAWS. 


Now and again, we have a dinner party at our house. 


Why? Because it's our turn.


Since this tends to coincide with spring, and because the White Trash Syndrome says you can't have people over without doing major cleaning, yard work, and buying enough food to feed the Chinese Army, it generally takes a week of preparation. 


At least.


Generally, our housekeeping is haphazard. We offer a lick and a promise most of the time, and get to it reluctantly when the dust bunnies start to crowd around the dog food bowls to be fed. If you live with dogs, you know that dog hair quickly becomes a condiment. 


Sometimes, it collects and rolls down the hall like tumbleweeds. Growls at the vacuum cleaner. 


The cat also brings us gifts, but now and then mislays them, and we don't always find them right away. It's the thrill of unexpected discovery–half a mouse here, part of a hummingbird there, Junco feathers in the washroom ...


DIAL UP THE MUSIC:


The party is upcoming and the work has commenced, and today, after a mere five hours, the two of us have managed to sweep, mop, vacuum, steam-clean the carpets, scrub the kitchen and bathrooms, and tire ourselves out real good.


The dogs whined to go out as soon as we moved the first stick of furniture. They hate having the cave rearranged and cleaned. 


This is how we define a cleaning frenzy: Once you get started, it is difficult to stop. When you find yourself on your knees with a toothbrush cleaning the baseboards and resorting to a knife to get that one fucking little spot there ... it is time to quit. No matter how much you've done, you notice stuff you missed, and that way lies madness ...


FREEZE FRAME. FADE TO BLACK.

Check Out the Bookmark

Mark Kilbane, my movie guy, is about to flit off to Hong Kong to a film shindig to which he's been invited, looking for a possible partner with deep pockets. He made up some bookmarks, of which this is one–front and back. Neat, hey? 

Wild Geese

My buddy Mike Byers, glass artist par excellence, is also a singer and guitar player of passing skill. Friends of his, Linda Hicks and Joe Peters, are putting together a CD, and while the song "Wild Geese" to which this link takes you may be sweetened somewhat twixt now and then, it sounds fine just as it is.


Give it a listen. Mike sounds a lot better than he looks. You ex-military guys will particularly enjoy it. I'm not one, but I thought it was dead-on.

Too Cute

Normally, I don't put up many family pictures–lot of loons out there in the hinterlands, but this is the newest addition to the family, a grand-nephew. No particulars, save how cute he is ...

Numbers Game

When I started this blog in the summer of '06, I didn't know about such things as hit counters and site stat trackers. I posted stuff, people dropped round to look at it and offer comments, and that was it.  No bells, no whistles, no movies, no musical offerings.

People came and went, but aside from postings they'd offer on what I'd written, I had no idea who, how many, or from whence they had come.

A year or so after the blog went up, I wondered if anybody was listening or if I was was hollering into the Void. I had seen these little stat counters on sites I visited, so I poked around and found one that offered tracking and counting and all, and I signed up. 

A few months after I did, the stat site crashed and I couldn't access it, so after waiting a couple weeks, I found another site offering similar services, StatCounter. They did a more reliable job, and I re-started the hit counter from zero. 

I can't tell how how many folks have come by and sat a spell since I started jabbering on here, but I can see how many have done so since I shifted to StatCounter, and those numbers have been going up steadily each year. At the current rate, by the middle of next month, that total will top half a million hits.

Not so many, given there are sites that log that many and more every day; still, it's interesting that a midlist genre author who prattles on about writing, martial arts, guitars, and general ephemera has attracted that many visitors.

Even the Silat Sera site I set up as a placeholder for Maha Guru Plinck, which intrinsically has a narrow range of interest, has collected almost ten thousand hits in less than a year.

As Spock says, "Fascinating ..."

Internet Research

Here's an example of why internet access is a boon to writers, despite all the crap out there. 


In the pre-Hayes Commission days, the 1934 movie "Tarzan and His Mate," starring Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan, had a four-minute sequence in the middle of it that featured Tarzan and Jane swimming around in the local water hole. Tarzan had on his loincloth, but Jane was nekkid. (Actually, there were three versions of the scene shot, so that locals could pick the one they wanted to avoid obscenity laws when they screened it. Pretty quick, all three versions were excised after complaints from the League of Decency.)


Eventually, Ted Turner bought the film rights, found the cut footage, and had it restored.


Tarzan grabs Jane's dress and tosses her into the pool from an overhanging tree branch. She loses the dress, hits the water, and he dives in after her.


They swim around under the water. It's pretty tame by today's standards. You can see Jane's backside, but the water is murky and dark enough so you don't see much else, and certainly not at normal play speed in theaters or on TV.


For a while, I thought that was O'Sullivan herself, but eventually found out that it was an Olympic swimmer,  Josephine McKim, who doubled her. Not so much for the nudity aspect, but because the underwater scenes needed a good swimmer who could hold her breath and do the acrobatics. 


And all this information is on the net, if you but ask the right question ...

Good Intentions

I've told this story before, but I don't see it on the blog right off, and somebody asked about bad editorial experiences, so I'm gonna tell it again.


Some years ago, I was asked to write a story for the local paper's Sunday magazine, a special issue featuring local science fiction and fantasy writers.


The length was short, so I decided to do a twist-ending, aka "tomato surprise" story. Not in O. Henry's class, but with that kind of nailer at the end.


My piece was about a running competition in a future where the winner gets to be the city's mayor. I had two candidates, and I was careful when describing one of them to be absolutely gender-neutra,l in my description, attribution, even the name, which was "Jackie." The reversal/reveal was that the character was a woman. That mattered to the story. That was the point of the story. 


My editor, a pleasant man who was a good non-fiction editor and who taught classes at the local U in how-to-write well, completely misread my intent and point. 


He obviously thought I didn't know how to use a pronoun, so everywhere that I had been scrupulous in not offering one, he changed the text to read "she," or "her."


Bam! Deader'n black plastic, the story.


But the surprise was mortally wounded before the story even started, because in his cleverness, he changed the title from what I'd had to "Gender Gap." 


No clue there. 


More, he didn't tell me about any of this, so that I could have explained what I was doing. I saw it when the story came out, and the result was a piece that made no sense whatsoever.
And a lot of jumping up and down and screaming on my part.


I called him, really steamed, and he was quick to apologize. It was the name, he said. His name was Jack, and he had hated being called "Jackie" as a boy, because to his mind, that was a girl's name. When he saw it in my story, he leaped to the conclusion–which was correct–that "Jackie" was a girl. Which I planned to tell people in the last graph, I wasn't going to hide forever, but by then, it was completely unnecessary.


I point this one out now and then to show that even a good editor can miss something, and that a good editor will also run his or her changes past the writer to make sure he doesn't screw it up  ...

Information Age Stubs Its Toe

For some reason that none of the FAQ's answer when I tried to figure it out, Comcast just up and started routing much of my email into its spam folder. People who are in my address book, posters to my blogs, folks I've gotten email from many times before.


I was wondering why my mail didn't seem to be the normal volume, and a few minutes ago, when I got to poking around, I just found a slew of it in the spam folder at Comcast.


Isn't that special?


If you emailed me and wondered why I didn't answer, that's why. I'll try to get back to you soon as I can. 


The Comcast filters don't seem to be something I can easily fix, and the adjustments available so broad they won't help. On or off, that seems to be the choice.


So I turned the spam filter off and am now using my email program's filters instead. That I can adjust and train to recognize the crud. 


I do get some junk mail. Whole lot of people in Nigeria are trying to send me millions of dollars; people are greatly concerned with my penis size and imagine I want it to be bigger; there are iPads going for $17, did I know that?


Uh huh. 

Top Ten Song

Over on SoundClick, they have quite a few tunes. When you upload a song, you get a choice of categories into which they will put it. My most recent addition, "Woke Up Dead Blues," was listed under–big surprise–"Blues." And the sub-category, "Acoustic Blues."


In the former list, they currently show 44,000 songs, and in the latter, just over a thousand. The song peaked at #66 in Blues, and #9 in Acoustic Blues.


Of the twenty-two songs I put up, most of them originals, some public domain covers, five have made the SoundClick Top 100 Song list. This doesn't mean that much, since new songs get a bump from curious listeners as they appear, but nonetheless, it is pleasing that I made the list at all.


Woot!

Writing List

Got a query from an editor, looking to update my bio for his house. Caused me to go through the ebooks I have put forth, and, as it turns out, that has grown to a fair number of titles. Check it out:

Novels - Original titles:

Bristlecone

Champion of the Dead

Curse the Darkness

Master of Pamor

The Dreadnaught (with Michael Reaves)

Backlist:

Windowpane

Spindoc

The Forever Drug

The Omega Cage (with Michael Reaves)

The Digital Effect

The Trinity Vector

Short Stories:

Gatekeeper in Hell (A Roy the Demon collection)

Neighbors

A&R

FNG

Balance of Power

Alliance

Under the Rose

Non-fiction:

But What If I Did This?! (essays on martial arts)

Interlude: Reflections on Music 

No Man But A Blockhead (essays on writing)

Speaking of Knives ...

Check out Chuck Pippin's work. Not only an outstanding bladesmith, but look at the leather.


Must be nice to have that kind of skill.

Influenza's Influence?

I don't think I have the flu, really, I don't, but I do have one of the symptoms of it, and so I am laying low and hoping for the best. Might just be the twenty-four hour stomach bug. Or maybe just a touch of something I ate. Or not. But I expect I'll know soon enough.

I am standing by ...

Cylinder Knife

So, the proof-of-concept prototype of the cylinder-handled knife. 


It's not what I'd want the finished product to look like–I worked with what I had on hand, and that included a beat-up old butterfly knife and some one-inch PVC pipe and caps. I'd want the blade to be wider, thicker, as in the original drawing, and I wouldn't have the caps, just a rounded butt and some kind of guard; however, it does give me enough of a feel for the design to tell me that it will work like I wanted. Proportions are off, I'd have the handle be a inch or so shorter, too, but there you go.


The knife's handle fit snugly into the pipe, and I cut slots at the top for the tiny guard that flares a bit at the base of the blade. With the knife pushed firmly in place, I cut a slot in the top cap for the blade, squirted a fair amount of epoxy into the handle to set everything, glued the caps on, and voila! It doesn't have to work, save to see if I can manipulate it. 


I'm sure a knifemaker could produce something ever so much more elegant. 

More Canons

And:

Got Talent?

This should make you feel like you aren't working hard enough. Does me.