Monthly Archives: August 2017

NaNoWriMo 2017, Writing

HELP! What should I write?

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Earlier I was firmly committed to my kaiju novel for NaNoWriMo this year. But now I’m wavering. I have three ideas, all of them equally attractive. So I’m throwing the question out to you, faithful readers:

What should Richard write for NaNoWriMo 2017?

  • And the Devil Will Drag You Under: Devils at war with each other in a modern city! (55%, 11 Votes)
  • The X of Doom: Pirates, sorcery, and time travel! (20%, 4 Votes)
  • The Wind Walker: A giant monster from Antarctica wreaks havoc on the Earth! (20%, 4 Votes)
  • Other: Please elucidate in a comment on this blog post. (5%, 1 Votes)

Total Voters: 20

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Of course, I won’t be posting my novel online this year for Reasons, but you’ll be able to request that chapters be mailed to you as I write them. I’ll work on a mechanism for that.

NaNoWriMo 2017

Storm’s a-brewin’….

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…and National Novel Writing Month 2017 is just around the corner. Lurking. Waiting. Ready to pounce on any unsuspecting writer who ventures too near its deathly maw.

So the answer is yes, I am participating in NaNoWriMo once more. And yep, I, along with Kat, will be one of the Municipal Liaisons for the Sacramento region. You may applaud.

This year, I think I’ll be writing The Wind Walker, a kaiju story. I mentioned it a blog post or two ago, and the more I think about it, the more excited I am about it. I’ll be plotting it and outlining it and so on. My short story “Anamet”, which I’m working on, is going to be a prequel for The Wind Walker, though it will have a very different tone.

And just for funsies, I created this potential cover art:

I made this with the “Pulp-O-Mizer Cover Maker“, which is way too much fun. Obviously if I ever get around to publishing The Wind Walker, I’ll need a whole new cover, but this one is inspiring enough for now. Go and make one of your own!

Still on my social media hiatus. I admit dipping into Twitter a couple of times here and there, but I can only last a few minutes at most without encountering something that upsets me. Ugh.

I did go to reactivate my account on Absolute Write. So find me there, if ye care to.

Anyway… uh… Comment here on my blog if you care.

Writing

Overworrying about a work in progress

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A number of years ago I wrote a short story, “Coyote Goes to College”. It was about a generic version of the Coyote trickster who populates the lore of some Native American tribes. I think it’s a good story and pretty funny, but should I publish it? I don’t know. Coyote isn’t a character that I invented, and comes from a culture that I don’t identify with. Input would be appreciated.

Another worry I have is about my novel-in-progress, Padma. The main character differs from me in many ways, but mostly she comes from a racial/cultural background — specifically, she is biracial (half white and half Indian) from India, though she was born in the US and came back at the age of 11, and has little knowledge or experience with her native culture; little enough so that when supernatural entities from Indian mythology show up, she doesn’t recognize them.

I would appreciate as many thoughts and comments as possible. If you could, please comment on this blog entry directly. I’m still on my social media hiatus, and may not see what you have to say if you say it on Twitter or Facebook.

Thanks!

Edited: It was pointed out to me that I misused the Twitter hashtag that I had included earlier. It’s been removed.

Administrivia, Asthma

What My Lungs Have Been Up To (Etc.)

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They told me I would probably grow out of my asthma.

They were wrong.

It’s true that my asthma is much better now than it was when I was an adolescent. Far gone are the days when I was swinging by the emergency room once or twice or three times a year to get a shot of epinephrine or a nebulizer treatment, but I’m still under the care of a pulmonologist, and my asthma is still a thing.

Almost a year ago, my asthma was acting up so severely and frequently that my pulmonologist and I decided to try a treatment called “bronchial thermoplasty“. I’ll go into the details of bronchial thermoplasty (BT) in another post; suffice to say, heat is applied directly to the lung tissues in order to reduce the bronchial inflammation that causes asthma.

I count the BT as a success. Although my peak flow rate hasn’t really changed that much, nor have my spirometry results, I’ve had a lot fewer flare-ups, and I haven’t had to go on Prednisone since the treatment concluded back in November.

Recently, though, I have been experiencing a flare-up. I’m chalking it up to the heat and the air quality (the air in Sacramento has been pretty chunky of late). I’ve increased the dosage of my Advair, and that has helped. But if this doesn’t clear up significantly by next week, I’ll start taking the Prednisone.

To be clear, the BT is not a “cure” for asthma, and was never advertised as such. In cases like mine, the asthma is basically a permanent state of affairs, although it can be well-managed. And what with improvements in drugs and so on (including the advent of treatments like BT), that management is getting much better. All that’s left to do are to make the lifestyle changes that my pulmonologist has been pushing on me for years now. Turns out I’m lousy at that.

In other news…

I’m still on my social media hiatus. I poked into Twitter today just to see what was going on, and I couldn’t make it past a few posts without getting anxious. Turns out Trump is still awful, and Twitter is still a tool for amplifying and echoing his awfulness, even among his opponents. Trump Tweets something foul, and gets retweeted, with pugnacious commentary, by everyone. Trump makes me anxious, and Twitter, therefore, makes me anxious as well. So I think I’m going to stay off Twitter for awhile longer.

Facebook is less problematic. I have logged in there a couple of times to check out what’s happening with my family and a few close friends, all while avoiding the politics. I don’t mind pictures of food or baby stories; on the contrary, I like those posts. Life is full of mundanities. Shouldn’t they be acknowledged, if not celebrated? Still, Facebook can be a time sink, and right now I need that time to work on my writing.

I did start up an Instagram account, but that is almost exclusively to keep up with my wife’s cat pictures. So far I haven’t posted anything myself.

Also, I’ve switched my blog back to its former theme. At some point I will sit down and customize my site and WordPress installation entirely. But, again, that will take time. So for now, enjoy the default theme from 2014.

 

Administrivia, Pop Culture

You Are Now Entering…

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I’ve been watching the original Twilight Zone series on Netflix, and loving it. I’m currently halfway through season 2, and last night I saw the episode entitled “Night of the Meek”. In this episode, Henry Corwin, a department store Santa, gets drunk and is fired from his job. He informs the store manager that the reason he gets drunk all the time, and especially at Christmas, is that he can’t bear to see all the suffering and sadness in the world, especially in the faces of children, and especially at Christmastime,and know that there’s nothing he can do about it. Look at this picture of him. Doesn’t he look sad?

But the night he’s fired, Henry stumbles across a magical burlap sack that seems, at first, to be full of nothing but garbage. But he soon finds that it’s full of gifts, and not just any gifts: the heart’s desire of anyone he encounters. He gives gifts to the downtrodden at a Salvation Army soup kitchen, to the manager of the department store he was just fired from, and to the neighborhood kids.

Finally the bag is empty, and he lets it drop to the ground and goes on his way… only to encounter a sleigh, some reindeer, and an elf who says to him, “We’ve been waiting for you!” Henry’s own wish — that he could be the real life Santa Claus to give gifts for everyone — has come true.

I personally think that “Night of the Meek” is one of the better episodes that Serling himself (who was born on Christmas Day) wrote, and it actually made me a little bit sniffly. When I read a book in 2003 called [amazon asin=0765301520&text=The American Fantasy Tradition], I was more than a little surprised to see that Rod Serling was not mentioned at all.

Reams and reams have been written about The Twilight Zone and its impact on American pop culture (especially in speculative fiction), and I won’t bother going into that here. For now, I’ll just say that the show definitely impacted my own creative sensibilities. Over the past couple of weeks, as I’ve been watching this show, I find myself feeling more inspired to work on my own fiction, and giving it more subtle twists and bits than I normally would be include toward. No one has ever accused me of being a very subtle writer, so perhaps binge-watching The Twilight Zone will help change that.

If you want to buy me something for Christmas or my birthday or just for the heck of it, might I suggest [amazon asin=1250082374&text=Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Twilight Zone: A Fifth-Dimension Guide to Life] by Mark Dawidziak? I heard the author interviewed on a podcast I regularly listen to and this sounds like a fun book.

A couple of administrative notes:

  1. As you know, I no longer cross-post to Livejournal. Now, I cross-post to Dreamwidth, where my username is underpope2.
  2. I’ve applied a new theme to my blog. What do you think? Is it pretty? Ugly? Pretty ugly? I think it needs some tweaks.
  3. Finally, I’ve moved some of the free stories off my writing page and onto their own page at My Monstrous Universe. Enjoy!

 

Pop Culture, Random Geekery

Today’s Secret Word Is…

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Today’s secret word is antepenultimate!

 

It will be defined in the antepenultimate paragraph of this blog entry. And this word has probably displaced defenestrate (which, of course, means to throw someone or something out of a window) as my favorite word.

Today, this blog entry is just about some snippets that happen to be floating in my brain. For example: In my opinion, the Terminator franchise ended with Terminator 2: Judgement Day. There was no need for any other films after that one. It wrapped up all the various threads and plot points and so on, and presented us with a nice clean storyline that worked on plenty of levels. It was a solid action story, but it also had depth of theme and characterization. The rest of the movies are just schlock cashing in on the name of the franchise.

That said, I did really enjoy the Terminator TV series: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.That show was well-written and executed, and deftly played with themes of time travel, family, and so on. It’s a shame that the WGA strike in 2007/2008 (am I right about the dates?) killed the show before it really got a chance to get going.

Same with the Alien franchise. Alien was a solid horror movie; Aliens was a solid action movie. Both are fine films. The rest of the films in the series are junk. Even Prometheus, which, I admit, was beautiful to watch, especially in 3D. I haven’t even bothered watching Alien: Covenant, though I might if it ends up free on Amazon Prime or Netflix. This video here demonstrates precisely why Prometheus was such an awful film:

Not all movies have to have thematic depth or solid characterizations to be good fun, of course. The 2014 Godzilla film was pretty much nothing but an action movie featuring giant monsters duking it out over the Bay Area. Characterization was kept to a minimum. It didn’t really hit the right thematic notes that the 1954 Gojira film had; that film was more about the US atomic attacks on Japan than about the monster itself. I enjoyed the 2014 Godzilla but I struggled with its purpose beyond the aforementioned monsters slugging it out.

The next American Godzilla film, Godzilla: King of Monsters, is, I believe, set to be released in 2019. Again, it will probably be light on character and theme, but heavy on CGI monsters battling each other.

Antepenultimate means “the third from the last”. As in, this is the third-from-last paragraph of the blog entry. Or, more precisely, “before the penultimate”.

And this entry is the penultimate paragraph; that is to say, second-to-last. I read a novel many years ago by Phillip K. Dick called The Penultimate Truth and it, like everything else Dick wrote, it was odd and bizarre and has stuck with me ever since I read it as a freshman at UC Davis. Come to think of it, this might have been one of the books that drove me toward getting a philosophy degree.

And this is the ultimate paragraph; that is to say, the final one. I hoped you enjoyed it.

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