Feeding the mind, body and soul.

This felt like the longest week in between posts. By all means, I could have done this post at any time during the week. I felt that keeping with the regularity of updating was good for me in regards to continuing a consistent blog in the future. That and it afforded me with plenty of time to play videogames. Taking a little post book release breather. It's good to give yourself a break here and there, since usually other people won't do it for you.

Aside from all of that, it has been an uneventful week in the aftermath of getting By Starlight - Before Dawn ready for purchase. I pulled the typed out manuscript for the novel, To Slice The Sky. Time to pick up at the halfway point in rewrites where I left off. Funny enough that I stalled out at the exact same point I stalled out while writing it. Granted the back half all came to me at once and I knocked it out in a fraction of the time it took me to write the front half. It's going to take a lot of work and some professional help, but there's something pretty underneath all those rough edges. To Slice The Sky follows Trip and Decker, whom we first met back in Urban Legends of the Future (now available for free at that link), in a big whirlwind adventure across New America that's about half their fault. It also features Manner, who was introduced in her standalone story Mind Your Manners in Urban Legends, and the clone team we'll meet in The Clone Wars, a story bundled in with By Starlight - Before Dawn. It's a story about two best friends and the price of achieving your dreams set against the backdrop of the Clone Rebellion. If it was the year 2099, that shit would be Pulitzer material.

This week brings us to part three of eight in the story of Tressie, Johnny and Gribelle. Plans are undertaken, investigations are afoot, and meals are had. This section is a little longer than the last one. Enjoy:

Startling revelations about the mating habits of fictional characters

Welcome back. Continuing on with promoting By Starlight - Before Dawn, we now arrive at the next step in the tale of Tressie, Johnny & Gribelle. Rising actions and fun with body mechanics await you in the text below. The covers are complete, the proofs have been read, and at least the eBook versions are available for pre-order. I wanted to stick with Halloween as a release date, opposed to releasing whenever, mostly because I think I deserve at least one release date to be Halloween in my bibliography. If only I could write fast enough to Long Halloween it and release a new horror upon the world every holiday. One day.

So, about those eBooks: Amazon. Smashwords. Each version has a separate cover. While the Amazon version is the "True" cover, I still like the Smashwords variant better. I fear I may be trying to make eBooks like comics. The paperback is still being worked on. The paperback sports much nicer formatting than the eBook. Both of which have better formatting than this blog.

Beyond cover variations, the Smashwords version of the first book in the Lilim Chronicles: Urban Legends of the Future, is now available for free. Non-related to the Lilim Chronicles, my poetry book, Pretty Words for Hateful Bastards, is also available at whatever price you want on Smashwords.

If you download, please review. But I've talked enough. It's time to give you what you came for.

Universally Subconscious

Hello again dear reader. With my next book, By Starlight - Before Dawn, being released at the end of the month, I figured what better way to entice one to read it than by letting them read it. Over the next few weeks leading up to the release day, I'm going to be releasing the chapters of the novella through this site. When the book becomes available (pending the completion of the covers), this site will be the first to let you know. I will also be reducing the eBook price of Urban Legends of the Future to the low low cost of $0.00 on both Amazon and Smashwords. Like Urban Legends, By Starlight - Before Dawn will be available in paperback as well as all eBook formats.

The following story is the first chapter of the novella that makes up the By Starlight portion of the book title. By Starlight picks up 25 years before Sucking Out Loud. We meet DJ/Slicer Tressie Unknown in the flesh and see Johnny Marko as a young, 17 year old punk in the SFV818 district of Hollywood. It's another story revolving around the Incubi/Succubi, so be prepared for sexy cyberspace fun.

Without further ado, I present to you: By Starlight.

Riddickulous

So I'm watching Riddick right now. I'm pretty sure it's almost over, but I just witnessed the coolest payoff in the series. It's a shame that most of the movie has been laboriously building up to a climax. Any time Riddick isn't on screen, the movie drags. I will say it's been better than Chronicles of Riddick, which really should have been a hard R.

But I digress.

I've been catching up on my Netflix DVD queue now that I've been watching Community on Hulu. I've finally gotten to that point in my queue where I'm getting movies at the bottom of my queue when I first signed up for the service. Yes, I'm blogging about my media consumption habits, and yes I'm going to say queue a fuck of a lot.

What excites me is that I'm going to get a bunch of cartoons in the near future. I was really high, scanning for things to add to the 140 slot of my DVD queue when Netflix recommended me to add Animaniacs. Animaniacs fed several afternoons of my middle school days with entertainment while I was doing my homework, so the nostalgia bug infected me and I went digging. I unearthed Freakazoid, which was by far my favorite Sunday morning cartoon. The Tick (which is also on the horizon) on Saturday and Freakazoid on Sunday. What a time the early '90s were.

So that's cool for me I guess. That and I'm also expecting the Harold & Kumar trilogy...

Harold & Kumar go to White Castle really was an excellent comedy. G-Mo, not so much. I haven't seen the Christmas special yet, but it can't be worse than any other Christmas movie ever. Really, outside of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, all Christmas movies are pretty wretched.

I also tried to watch every Keanu Reeves movie in his filmography. I unironically love Keanu Reeves and he is my favorite actor. Which reminds me that I have yet to see John Wick. Why? I don't have an answer. I should rectify that finally. It's ridiculous I haven't seen it yet. It's not like I don't have access to HBO Go where it's on the streaming list.

Besides my unabashed love of cartoons, Kumar, Keanu Reeves and Riddick my Netflix queues are a wash of "maybe one day I'll watch this." Like all those movies and shows you hear people talk about and think, "Oh yeah, I should like totally watch this and stuff. It will expand my horizons and make me seem cultured at the next three social engagement I attend. Or, like, you know, whatever."

I have no doubt that I'll end up seeing 100+, and if it's one thing I know about old people, they sit around and watch TV all day long. What else are you going to do with yourself? Some people have the TV on the same channel all day long and a lot of cable stations play endless marathons of various shows in four hour blocks. I'd like to think I have plenty of time to watch everything I've wanted to eventually. After all, I did watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on repeat until the VHS wore out. Granted, I'll be 100 in 2082, and by then I've predicted we'll have holovision with multiple smart-display options. So who knows if the future will hold up to my imagination and if television will be as awsome when I'm a geriatric.

Toying with emotions

I've been reading a lot of tvtropes again while on break at work. It's a blessing and a curse because it eats up time real easily. Some folks crush candy, I read wiki articles.

I was reading about Shipping today. As I browsed the examples, It got me thinking about all the sitcoms I've watched recently and thought about all the relationships I've rooted for and hexed.

I'm not one for romantic subplots, or main plots for that matter. They don't appeal to me to write them, but I do so love them in media like everyone else. Folks that claim they hate romantic subplots are only doing it for the show. But if a story does have a romantic subplot, the politics of romance handling is a field of daisies riddled with landmines.

At the behest of a friend, and a recent acquisition of a hulu account, I've started watching Community. I just finished season 2, and so far Troy and Abed are my OTP. In that tiny, yet incestuous study group, it's rife with potential pairings. And thanks to the show's style of humor, it also points out their analogs from previous ships. i.e.: Jeff and Britta are Sam and Diane from Cheers. Aloof, vain and boorish meets caustic, false-worldly and psychotic.

What makes us root for surrogate relationships in media? Why did we always wish that Joey and Phoebe would bang? Why did we want Jerry and Elaine to get back together? Why were we so disappointed when How I Met Your Mother defied all logic and broke up Barney and Robin. Maybe we're made to get into everybody's business by design, or maybe it's our inquisitive nature, but fake relationships are serious business.

Excuses for procrastination

Still in the process of banging off the rough edges of By Starlight - Before Dawn. My excitement for quick release is only tempered by my desire to make it as close to perfect as possible. Though, as I'm learning from my previous two books, even when you have multiple sets of eyes on a project, and your own anal retentiveness, it never ends up perfect. Hell, even the Lord of the Rings still has typos in it 61 years later.

And it's stuff like that that makes me paranoid. As a self published author, you have way more scrutiny from the uncaring public because the mass has let them down before. Getting your head above water in a sea of mediocre suck is never easy. I applaud anyone who's done it, even if the product you did it with was absolute stylistic drek. Granted, I write genre fiction like a gonzo journalist. Literary fiction snobs would probably say I churn out nothing but pulpy stylistic drek, so I can't fault anyone making a living off of the same.

But the greater concept of "ruining it for the rest of us" is why gatekeepers existed in the first place. And why there is a huge bloated corporate machine that's had decades and centuries to build itself up into an unstoppable juggernaut that's being slowly bled down to size. We're just in the current phase of figuring out something new from a long history of bad mistakes. And all those bad mistakes are going to die the great death of being forgotten in name by the beast of history. But they will live on in the cracked foundations of human society as all the reasons why we have to live in whatever way we'll be living in the future. Because some stupid asshole in the long ago said they'd do something that's awesome, and they produced anything between jack to shit.

Because of this, creative freedom has been stifled by the gatekeepers and people behind the gates. All by virtue of what they allow to be associated with their names, the ones inspired by those works are forced to work within the perceived parameters dictated by those behind the gates. This can work out great for those that want to work within confines, but it's also a surefire way to wallow in the derivative and plagiarized. It's also stifling to those with bigger aspirations than what's being handed to them.

I spent my teen and adult years living the punk ethos of doing it yourself, and getting shit done as cheaply and excellent as possible. Granted, I'm the type of person that usually ignores production value if the product is awesome enough and has an energy that I vibe with. I've listened to enough 4-track demos that were way more awesome than the slick, overproduced album counterparts to know you need a little dirt on it to be perfect. But not everyone else is like that.

We've cycled into a very antiseptic time. Everything is very clinical, and we're afraid of everything. Allusions could be drawn to classic science fiction literature, but that's for some other asshole to ramble about. I entered my tweens when grunge was exploding, and the world I see now is dull and too formulaic. We've theorycrafted all our little life hacks and now no one deviates from the prime directive. I've heard all about great men having set schedules and all that shit, and it seems everyone took it more seriously than I did. Granted, real life is made more chaotic in thanks to everyone trying to maximize their life and time and meet deadlines they made up. Except when there's a new set of 32 GIFS that only 00's kids with a disability that work retail will get, then set schedules are a myth.

I'm a believer in getting things done when they need to be done. Sometimes it's sooner, sometimes it's later. If it needs to be done, it'll get done, and it'll be complete as soon as possible after starting. However, taking the time to do something right, is always better than just getting it done. Which is why I'm insisting on taking my time with getting By Starlight - Before Dawn into the best shape possible before it's released into the wild.

It will be released by Halloween. How soon before Halloween is up in the air, but by Halloween is for certain. My commitment to that release is why I spent all day fixing drafts instead of making a blog post on Sunday. And this blog post was just a roundabout way to justify procrastinating on writing it. At least it got done.

Office Space

Ugh.

I hate work. I really do. Having to do things for other people to make a tiny, necessary, percentage of their profits, brings up vitriol in me. I understand its necessity in regards to getting shit done that needs to be done, but let's just say I'm all for automating business. I say that as someone who's lived in the working class their whole life.

My ideal world: robots do the sucky work for us at incredible rates. 3D printers make most manufacturing needs obsolete, personalized goods are the norm. Money is pointless and everyone gets to do whatever they feel like.

But no. We worked our way through barter systems to bitcoins, and we're still in that stage where people believe you have to work to make a living. That fucking sucks.

I don't particularly enjoy the company of others. I enjoy those that I'm close with, and I enjoy most people one on one, but I don't like big groups. I also hate being made to treat someone like they're the only person that matters when they act like an asshole. It's not how humans are supposed to be handled and counterproductive to making that person not an asshole.

Writing is the only thing I've gotten paid for that makes me feel good about myself.

Speaking of which, I should be writing a new draft for the last story of By Starlight - Before Dawn. Coming soon, to an internet retailer in your bookmarks folderrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.