Goodnight, Travel Well

Heyooooo.

Another weekend to another week with all sorts of stuff that happened, and not very much of it was interesting. Well, unless you enjoy hearing about people playing videogames, which I hear there's a market for that.

I've been working on edits and drafts of short stories for their rerelease. I'm going to keep my original books out on the market, but move them to free. Basically keep them like "garage days" versions of the stories that I'm releasing now. I've rewritten Heroine of a Thousand Faces and almost finished with Things that are Cold. They're retitled and are so restructured and remixed from the original version, it's almost like they're alternate universe versions of one another. Granted, the new versions of both stories are like, way better written. Or at least on the level of where I'm at now compared to where I was at when I finished the last draft. I also heard back from a couple magazines with the most positive rejection letters I've received so far. I'm invigorated to rock out some more work and touch up a couple others. I'm glad to finally have people tell me, "didn't quite make it, but please send more". That's been my #writerslife this week and the previous.

A deserted Chinese playground is the perfect metaphor for this game.

Videogamewise, I beat DOOM (2016) last night, and it was awesome as awesome can be. I finally started playing Resident Evil 6. Remember how I was playing through all the Resident Evil games last year? Well, I played all of them but 6, and it's been about the biggest disappointment so far.
It's mostly disappointing because it won't get the hell out of its own way. And I'm really not a big fan of the crossover sections where you have to essentially play the same level as a previous storyline, "but this time, two other people got their first." I don't know if that makes sense, but it sure is annoying to be cheated out of additional content because of game concept. In other Resident Evil related news, I just ordered VII from amazon. It should be here tomorrow. Yay president's day.

In the wake of finishing DOOM, and since I already played through (and loved) Wolfenstein: The New Order, I fired up the prequel, Old Blood. I played through the prologue of it, and it was like a less cool version of New Order. I'll give it some time. I found the Skyrim iron helmet. See. Look to the left. Just a little to the left. There it is! Aren't easter eggs neat?

Since I've been playing Bethesda published games, on top of playing Resident Evil, I've been looking to play The Evil Within for... over a year now. So that's on my horizon. I've been trying to chip away at my game catalog as best as I can, and I've thankfully been getting it done. Especially since I've finally been spending time with Final Fantasy XV, rolling with the homies on my bro trip.

"Isn't being rich awesome?!"

I've enjoyed the game while I've played it, but I know that it's going to be a big one. Last time I played a modern, highly anticipated, RPG, was Fallout 4, and I sunk 2 months of my life in game time into it. And all my stuff kept getting lost underneath my house... Damn you Fallout 4! Damn you! I've been a fan of Final Fantasy since the SNES days. Final Fantasy VI was the game that solidified my love of JRPG's and I've since made my way through the entire series from start to finish multiple times. I haven't sunk more than 4 or so hours into it, but I've enjoyed my time thoroughly playing the game. I just know that FFXV is going to be a time commitment before I'm done with it. Hence why I'm "getting sidetracked" by playing shorter games.

Fitting in time for media is a very serious affair. Much like I've been back to binging on Buffy, and have started Angel as well. The missus and I are groaning through the last season of Hell on Wheels. We have 3 episodes left and man, it started out as such a great western. Since I'm watching Buffy again, I finished season 3, so I'll be writing a recap soon. Since I'm watching each episode back to back, I'm on S4e4 of Buffy and S1e4 of Angel. I'd like to do my season 3 recap before I get to the end. As of now, I'm standing on season 3 being my favorite season. That could possibly change at any moment.

Alright, what games I'm playing, what I've been watching, and what work I've been doing. I think we're all wrapped up here. And this is where I leave you with the final final chapter of To Slice The Sky.

This is the epilogue, and was again well received as an ending on reddit. I'm pleased with the ending I landed on, but still feel like I could make it a little tweaking when I do my next pass over. So, with that, I leave you with the tail end of this serial novel that will turn itself into a traditional novel with a little bit of final buffing and stitching.

NAKED DOG

Arguing with the Deus Ex Machina

I really was planning on making good on my tweet earlier this week, but instead I made other decisions. This week was a really boring week where all I did was work for monetary and scholastic gain. Otherwise, working on some story rewrites and coming up with great revisions. Should be on sale through Amazon, Smashwords, and other fine eBook retailers by spring.

I'm nursing a hangover from a pub crawl last night, so this is going to be short and sweet. Today's post is the final chapter of To Slice The Sky's thrilling conclusion. Yes, we are finally here.

The ending was well received on its round through reddit, and I hope that you feel similarly. I'm gonna get back to drinking water and eating spicy food to sweat out all this beer.

Sad bastard music.

Look at me, leaving you hanging right at the end.

This week has been a struggle to get through, especially since it seems that everyone I come in contact with seems to find me distasteful just for being myself. Needless to say, it left me in a state where I very much didn't want to create content for something where all it contains is me. I'm sure everyone feels like they don't belong in the world, but I know not everyone takes it that hard.


So, yeah, I'm lonely, frustrated, and depressed. That's why I didn't post until Saturday after starting the year off OK and then some. I'll spare you from ranting about my first world problems of feeling unfulfilled in life while living in the largest major metropolitan county in the richest and most populated state in America, here's some good things that happened.

Soup inside

I made French Onion Soup for the first time, so that was cool. Granted, for my first time making it, I also didn't really make it, since I added in beef chunks and topped it with bacon. So good. It's definitely soup weather, since it's been raining non-stop. Not like California doesn't need it, but, I'm tired of being out in it.

I also made a Guinness beef pot pie, but I didn't take any pictures of it. It's a pie. Not much is photogenic about meat pie.

School's continuing to go well, now that the new semester has begun. My Short Stories class has been interesting so far. But, since it has over 60 students enrolled, it's not very engaging on a classwork level. I'm pretty much posting A level work to be ignored by goobs that get away with writing a paragraph generally with no depth or insight. And all the low hanging fruit pickers comment on those posts, lazy bastards. It's not like it's my grade that's going to suffer, but it's just another example of trying so hard, and getting so far, but in the end, it doesn't really matter.

"PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!"

Math has been insular, and mostly me just chugging through the daily work, trying to maintain as high a grade as possible. It's pretty much cheating, since I'm taking the lowest level of required Math, because of course my previous units didn't transfer. But being a basic college level math class, the other students attending it are pretty damn dumb. On the class forum, someone actually asked where the Roman numeral keys were on a keyboard. If you're also currently wondering that, there's no hope for you.

I'm already on week 3/8 for this session, and all I want is for it to be over. I want this year to be over to move on with the next one. Just hoping I can maintain my schedule of actually graduating by end of year.

My fiancée and I have officially begun wedding planning. My responsibility is looking for a DJ and catering, and all things entertainmentwise. So it's my job to make sure a party half in my honor is fun for everyone else who attends. What kind of twisted world do we live in where this has become an expected tradition? We haven't even gotten close to the nitty gritty of planning and already I'm longing for the days when marriage was little more than contract negotiations with a ceremony paid for by the father of the bride. I say nuts to this modern liberated woman business and saddle me up with 3 fatted calves and a parcel of land. If you've ever wondered why boorish and outdated modes of thought are still prevalent to this day, it's because the alternative takes too much work.

If you're confused how I can talk about being lonely when I'm also prepping to be married, let me quote OKGO's song, "The House Wins": You don't have to be alone to be lonely.

And in the best news, which will segue into our next part, I'm officially done with my draft of To Slice The Sky. Yay! 🎉🎊🎈

Now that I'm done with the novel for my second time, I'm currently giving it a read through and seeing what needs to be tightened up and fixed. The beginning needs a bit of work to catch up with the end, but it's all manageable. I was pretty surprised that it jumped in word count instead of shrinking with all the cutting I've done. There's entire chapters that were excised and changed, and whole swatches of useless first draft junk removed.

Today's chapter for TSTS picks up on Decker's side of the plan to deal with all of our problems with New America. While Trip is infiltrating Roplaxive's east coast servers, Decker is on the side of the country where the actual fighting of the clone rebellion is taking place. There, he's tasked with making sure that Gene Works Inc.'s rogue AI gets shut down before its infection spreads beyond the neuronet and into the real world. So here's part 2/4 of our climax. I posted it on New Years Eve on reddit to try and be all symbolic since the whole plan takes place on New Years Eve. However, because of that, or because this chapter sucks, or because the new title I gave it is dumb, it was wholly ignored. So... have fun!

Fat dog.

"I'm not fat. I'm just drawn that way."

The Revolution Will Be Compromised

I joked about a new Monday time slot, but, hey, third time's the charm.

I've been spending my free time sleeping, watching Top Chef, or playing Mass Effect. I just finished up another chapter on New Years Eve, and have been taking the last couple days to chill on the writing front. We'll see if I spend my time wisely tomorrow.

I have plenty of chapter work left to give, and I plan on hitting out the last two chapters of the novel before the end of the month. So, here's a dip into more serious turf after all the breeziness of the last couple chapters. Not to say that this chapter doesn't have its lighter moments, but this is the first look of the actual rebel clones that have taken up the background of this story.

The fighting is much more prevalent on the west coast than in Ocean City, where it was more of an underground movement localized in a ghetto. But now we're in full blown fighting in the streets, hit and run guerrilla tactics and trying to capture how a movement sprung from whispers in the dark. This chapter is a pay off of chapter 3's news reports of clones setting themselves on fire in protest, and a little more light gets shed on the rebellion at large that our Clonetown group has been trekking across new America to join.

Today's chapter actually almost catches us up to where I am in the rewrite progress, which means that it's also quite close to the end. We've got 5 more chapters to go before this whole preview experiment comes to a close.

It's weird thinking about how long this novel's taken to even get to this point. This whole deal started as a blurb in my notebook back in 2010 after I had a dream. I was living in apartment 211 at the inspiration for Das Komplex and I woke up alone that morning. Trying to hold onto all that I could from the dream, I opened my notebook to the first blank spot I could find and jotted down the basic premise at the core of the story. Essentially a barista hacker saving his best friend from a super mega corp. Over the years more inspirations and pieces fell into place. The clone rebellion started as a conversation over breakfast about cloned actors reshooting classic films for holovision. That added the clone angle, which isn't really a cyberpunk trope, but it's in Neuromancer. The name+number convention that I use for Brawl17 was inspired by 3Jane. I felt the number before the name didn't flow as well as the number after.

But from that dream it turned into an outline, into a first draft, and now we're here. It took six years, and we're almost at the end. It could have taken much less time, but hey, it's about the journey, not the destination, right? Whatever, I've rambled enough. Here comes the chapter. DOG!

Internet Archiving and You - The Necessary Job of Our Future To Make Today Matter

Hello world and internet archivists of the future (by me recognizing your profession, you have to save this blog's contest in the future. That's the rule here in the past. It's true, look it up. First link you'll find is this blog. Citationed). Welcome to another posting in our new weekly time slot of Monday. Maybe. Who knows. I'm trying to get myself to blog just to blog. Not really attach a day on it.

If you just randomly clicked on a link somewhere and you ended up here, and now you're all compelled because I'm talking about internet archivists and such, let me tell ya a little something about me. I tend to not do well with structure, and really prefer to do things when I do them within my ever so endless checklist of wants and needs. I have the feeling that I have an obligation to do things, and I blame it on being allowed to put things in archival lists and queues. It was just steamsale, man. I have like ten more games to play now, and I want to try and rebuild the heavy metal theme park my buddy & I built back in the day on Roller Coaster Tycoon. Why are you trying to deny me that? Anyway...

You would think that expressing myself to a potential audience as a voice shouting in the crowd would give me more drive to actually do it, but man, I got other stuff going on just like you. I have to actually do all the stuff I talk about in order to talk about it. Lest someone call me out about it in the comments one day and go, "Yo that shit's lies, man. Ya dindo shit lolfag" and then I'm the one who's the asshole. No thanks.

But to quote Stan Lee in Kevin Smith's overstated commercial flop and understated cult hit, Mallrats, "You keep reading them, I'll keep writing them."

And more refers to stinkpalms.

So, yeah, Holidays and flash flood warnings, and playing Mass Effect, and trying to find a copy of Christmas Vacation and having to settle on the edited for basic cable where they abuse the hell out of saying non-defecation, "shit," but heaven forbid you let grandpa drop that he drank to deal with Christmas going to hell. I don't really feel like going on a censorship rant for no reason, but the mood may hit me.

Habenero Hot Sauce Tamale Shooters - only @ Black Angus

I made tamales with my family. AND for my first time ever, hot sauce, from my bongwater grown habaneros. We've got the beginnings of a Mexican restaurant from the amount of friends and family asking for some, so that's cool. Ended up with 16 or so dozen out of 75lbs of masa. We ended up doing a number of variations with the fillings. That is to say, when I took over stuffing, I mixed it up with all of the ingredients and stopped being as stingy as my sisters with the filling. My mom & I had a spirited back and forth about spreading masa. She's all into the glop it on and spread method, and I'm all about the nice even layer. I feel the superior tamales were shown in the final taste test. You know what the best part of masa is? The thin little bits that get stuck on the hoja that are all crispy. All I gotta say.

In the hot sauce department, it was cool making something out of a plant that grew by complete accident. Inspiration hit in thanks to catching up on Pretty Good Cooking. As luck would have it, the latest episode at the time was Habanero Hot Sauce. My only deviation from Phil's recipe is I added garlic, substituted lemon juice for lime, and in my final blend, I added cilantro. I feel that really boosted the flavor of it, while giving it a nice look in the bottle. Your food should always be pretty. Picture up above notwithstanding.

Present Day

So, yeah, that's what my week was full of. And serving coffee too early in the day and trying to slang words by night. Still waiting for responses back on all of my pieces. The waiting game sucks. Just silent indifference after an autoreply@donotrespond. But it gives you the opportunity to futz about with other things, as you nervously edit everything down by self doubt, and because you realize that rough drafts are way too unimaginative and stale.

I mentioned last week I have a lot of chapters done already that I haven't posted, so today's ramble about antique computer games and a potentially current discipline within the social sciences that will preserve internet history for as far as evolutionary life will allow us to spread the past knowledge of the internet, our diligent internet archivists, leads us to one of those chapters. Those stream of consciousness, mid sentence asides, are exactly what you came for. Same with meta, fourth wall breaking nods to an audience that was never really there. That one was for the internet archivists of the future that know when I finally abandon this site. I'm really swinging for the fences in this one.

Which is just silly because the chapter today is also silly. We met Trip's trainwreck of a mother back in what was at one point chapter 9 (my novel is going through metamorphosis) and now in, for continuity's sake, chapter 21 we meet Decker's. This chapter is light and airy and still needs some work, but it's meant to be a breather chapter before everything gets all serious (well, as serious as it could be).

Decker's mother is sort of an amalgam of my Grandmother and my mother. As well as how my far more latino friends were treated by their mothers. That on and off switch of, "I love my sweet Angel, even if he is a worthless troublemaker," is what I tried to capture. I really need to work on my Spanish in between classes. Would my audience grow if I switched languages?

Is the English speaking world tired of me already? Am I over conflating the dynamics of grassroots marketing with a lazy and self-driven exploratory energy to make myself seem like, to an internet archivist of the future, on the cusp of my game, ready for a breakthrough? Probably.

I always imagined releasing this novel when I was first outlining it. I couldn't keep up with the schedule of that, so this has worked for me so far. I have until, what, February or something for it to be a year of me posting chapters? Lazily at that? I wanted to release a book online then package it at the end, and when I think about it, that's exactly what I've been doing. I thought of it more along the lines of me releasing chunks of chapters, and adding in notes and such in hyperlink, like above, to hilight where certain ideas were pulled from, in order to give a better understanding and more tangible world to the text. Since this is my first time doing something like this, it's pretty unpolished, and sorta slapdash put together since I'm learning on the fly, but like I said up at the top, I do things at my own pace and be real about it.

And that pace has ramped up to give you the chapter I've been hyping up as if to overconflate its value as a pet scene. How you feel about it may vary, but here's my pet dog in his Christmas cape.

Source: Internet Archive Photo - Dogs in clothes

Excuses to day drink and start fires

What is up my D-O-G-E's? How does you this Labor Dabor?

Blah blah, sorry missed last week, and this is a day late, blah.

Trust me, not much was missed by me not checking in. Just busy days at work, and busier times at night, learning Español and finishing up The Martian Chronicles. I also finished writing the next chapter for To Slice The Sky. It seems like Act II has mostly been revisions and full on rewrites to accommodate a slumping mid-section that didn't really rise action, and sort of meandered about without much direction.

It's been a pretty mixed bag of emotions doing rewrites for this draft of the novel. Here we are staring down at the last quarter of the year, and I'm 1 chapter away from closing up Act II. Granted, everything for the novel flows considerably better, and should just need a proofreading and slight tune-up around the newer additions to get everything uniform. So I'm sort of exasperated with myself for not being further along in the process, and that I've done such huge sweeping changes on things that weren't working. But on the bright side, I'm also realizing that since I began the outline back in Summer of 2011 that I've thankfully become a better writer during that period and can discern that what I had at first was crap, and now I'm able to craft much more coherent narratives. At least I think I can. You're more of a judge of that than I am.

I've also decided that for the omnibus version release of The Lilim Chronicles wave 1, I'm going to have to go back and do one last retouch on By Starlight as well as Urban Legends of the Future. For the release, not only will I be editing the two collections, but also making some needed changes to make the world more cohesive. They'll be getting new--unifying--covers, and I'll be rebranding myself as well.

I've been working on a writing assignment for my Spanish class, and my original topic was going to focus on Latino/a science fiction authors. I came across two major problems, 1) I needed articles in Spanish, and everything I found on the topic was in English. & 2) Every article was pretty much a repeat of, "Where are all the Latino/a science fiction authors?" A quick look at the name at the top of this website, or the name above the link you clicked to get here, probably has you wondering, "What the hell does that have to do with you, gringo?" Well, my father's European surname and Western naming conventions aside, I'm Mexican from my mother's side. I specifically made my character Decker Mexican-American because pretty much the only Latina character I've had to look up to in Science Fiction is Vasquez from Aliens, and while externally I'm a blue-eyed, lightly tanned, whiteboy I grew up with my mom's family in Los Angeles.

In my writing, I've wanted to express a lot of my frustration with being trapped between two worlds as a mixed race person in America, and try to write a lot about conflicting dichotomies, and while it's all well and good, I don't feel that my voice does anyone anywhere much justice coming from another white guy trying to tell everyone how to live. That, and my current pen name is clunky as hell, and being called, "Chris-py" my whole life is pretty old after thirty+ years. So after two paragraphs of justification, with the re-release of my wave one books, I'm going to be changing my pen name across the internet, borrowing my mother's maiden name. So, my book making moniker will be Christopher Fernandez going forth. Doesn't that just flow so much better? Say it out loud with an accent: Christopher Fernandez. ¡Muy picante!

Reconnecting to a culture that got lost in pre-civil rights era American white washing has been a thing in my adult life that I've tried to achieve, and along with learning Spanish like my aunts/uncles/mom never did, this is just one more link in that chain. Not like I'm planning on changing my actual name, but as far as pen names go, Bollweg just ain't sexy. Which is probably one of many reasons I've never heard it used during intimacy.

Aside from moral queries into what is and isn't cultural appropriation, I finished reading Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. Man, what a fantastic read. It definitely is a collection that builds upon itself and got way better with each passing story. In particular, I really loved the chapters Usher II (where a former English professor builds Poe's House of Usher on Mars, inviting all the moral watchdogs from Earth on a deadly tour through it), the highly reprinted, "There Will Come Soft Rains," (a story of an automated house when there's no more humans to automate for) and the final story, "The Million-Year Picnic". For being such a fan of poetry, I'm really surprised I wasn't ever as enthralled with the lyric delivery of Bradbury's prose back in high school. It's so flowing and evocative that pages disappeared before my eyes before I realized, "Oh, shit. I was so wrapped up in the flow, I don't know what I'm reading about." And going back, realizing all these beautiful words I'd read were about such bleak and alienating topics.

Even if the science has harshly shown everything about The Martian Chronicles to be a Space Opera fever dream from 1950, the biting satire on Cold War American life, and the destructive tendencies of well meaning Americans when faced with the consequences of our cultural lifestyle, is as fresh as it was 66 years ago. Yeah, sixty-six damn years, and we still haven't learned a damn thing, and are possibly on the verge of making all the same mistakes we've been warned about for over half a century. It's things like that that make me wonder if everything I wrote about representing the Latino-American science fiction writing population is a waste since clearly humanity has learned jack and shit from reading SciFi over the years.

But at least we have smart phones now.

Well, without further ado, here's chapter 16 from To Slice The Sky. Dog:

Take Meta Mars

I almost didn't blog this week. You know, like last week. But I have a lot of good reasons that don't involve wasting my time playing Civilization. Well, I did that, but I finally finished my chapter, did a ton of school work, fought with financial aid, had a busy work week, and am now sitting here with my dog, ready for the attack of the blog.

So yeah, in a nut shell, I went to work and got prepped for the starting of the fall semester. I'm currently halfway through Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. I first read it half-assed when everyone else was reading along to Huck Finn in English class. I didn't really enjoy it the first time around, but I also didn't really understand McCarthyism, nor did I really pay it much attention since I had to periodically pretend that I was paying attention. Now that I'm reading it with a contemporary mind aged about 18 years, I'm noticing more to it. Also, I've never really been too stoked on Bradbury from any of the other books I've read from him (Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man, & Dandelion Wine) but something about this book this time around, I'm enjoying the poetry of Ray's prose. While it seems dated in some regards, particularly the romantic Mars of H.G. Wells and E.R. Burroughs, and the pre-space race knowledge of what it was like traveling to outer space, the novel has a certain charm, mingled with a 1950's paranoia and sense of blind optimism.

I don't care who you are, that's a sweet cover.

A Princess of Mars was quite a pulpy and overly dated adventure. Not like I could expect more from Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1912, but despite its shortcomings by contemporary standards, it still has plenty of things that awoke that boyhood spirit of adventure in me. Even if at it's heart it's a story about a Mary Sue former Confederate officer that basically wins everything on Mars by fortune and force of will. He teaches savage warlords how to love, he rises to the top of the civilized and technologically advanced army in one battle, he ends a bloody civil war, and beds the most beautiful and beloved princess on the red planet. All in a days work for our hero, John Carter. It's one of those stories about the white man's burden that really could be about anyone else, but because it comes from a time of social bigotry and backwards thinking, it's unfortunately really a book about systematic racism and power fantasies. However, it's also just a bad ass, ultra-violent, kinda ridiculous, tell not show, sword and sorcery romp on a dying planet, so it's technically science fiction. The main saving grace is the world building Burroughs does. The world of Barsoom and all it's rich inhabitants are just as much racial space opera expys as all the ones from Mass Effect, but I'll be damaged if they're not both dear to my heart. Speaking of Mass Effect, the Krogan are totally just shorter Tarks missing a set of arms. They even keep Caldor's, aka Varrens. Still, choice read if you don't want to think to hard and just get wrapped up in a dumb adventure story that's fun to read.

Besides my playing Civ (I managed to pull off a culture victory as Gandhi after having to eliminate Kamehameha since I didn't have enough time to wait for Polynesia to come under my influence) and reading Mars fiction, I've been overloaded with work from Spanish class. I wish I had a group of six other ethnically diverse people to form a study group and have wacky online adventures with. Maybe we'd even have a catchy theme song sung by some Alt Rock band. I would type something funny for you to toss into Google translate, but I'm sick of halbar Español for today, or however you conjugate hablar in Spanglish. I spent most of my time setting up all the ridiculous hoops one has to jump through when learning a language online for credit. The online third party site, with proprietary useless book that's a vessel for the $150 access code so you can participate in the class.

BTW, if you've been under a rock for the last few decades, higher education is a damn grift.

So, book reviews, life update, oh, right... novel chapter. So I just wrote today's chapter. This is essentially a first draft. Not really a rough draft, but definitely all new material that hasn't had much editing. This actually got an upvote on /r/cyberpunk_stories (which is standard), so I've got that going for me. We say it's not about the internet points, but how else am I supposed to gauge if I'm on the right track with the limited fanbase I'm shilling to?

So let's kick some tires and light some fires. Dog:

Caution: Street Walking Cheetahs.

The week was long and full of trials, its ending welcomed like a returning lover. But its end only began a brief respite in the face of ever rising odds stacked against me like so many decks dealt from the bottom. I kept telling myself my troubles were light, and that for each day passed through was another victory for life. But life was a tricky mistress, and she didn't like to return after she flitted off on a whim.

"Why are you talking like that?"

This week was a testament to what I'll do to release tension, and how I have no clue how to relax anymore. With dual-day jobs in full effect, I'm cherishing the moments I can take to myself whenever I can. Especially since work has always been my greatest generator of misery, and as such creative fire. I'm sure I've done more side project planning and drafting while on the job than my actual job over the last 16 years. It's like Bukowski working at the post office and writing reams of pissed off poetry and a book. As much as I hate working for other people, I do fear I'd lose all my inspiration if I ever had to give it up. Granted I'd probably become a shut-in if I didn't have to leave my house for work, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.

Getting a jumpstart on summer session for school, I'm taking a Noir Fiction class, I read The Maltese Falcon for the first time. I also have The Big Sleep (which I've previously read), The Killer Inside Me (reading next), Strangers on a Train and Double Indemnity (only seen the movies), and I've been falling back into my habits of film noir love. I was a little underwhelmed by The Maltese Falcon, since I had such high expectations of it. The structure and parts of the story were excellent, and the tropes it codified are some of my favorites in fiction, but Hammett's writing was pulpy in the, "I'm getting paid per word for a serialized story," unlike Chandler's more poetic prose. It was too descriptive while it was going for atmospheric. Also, the entire thing could have been a short story over a novella with all the conversations of everyone going, "We know you know something, spill it." "Well I know you know something, so you spill it and maybe I'll spill it." And repeat for 217 pages. Hammett seems like he was a cool guy with a lot of issues, but unfortunately one of his issues was writing dull prose for his cool ideas. I dunno, maybe I should read Red Harvest too, since that's hailed as his masterpiece. Maybe if I didn't read Chandler before Hammett I would have had lower expectations, but Raymond Chandler's prose is exactly what I think of when it comes to Noir.

And all this steeping into Crime Fiction got me thinking randomly about Vegas. I used to live there, and I have friends who used to and currently do live there, not to mention it's just a four-hour drive away from LA, so it's pretty much treated as our weekend retreat so we don't puke in our own city (that's what the rest of the week is for). And of course with Vegas comes gambling. I'm not much of a gambler, but I do like a drink at the end of the day. And with no last call Vegas for me was hanging out with people gambling while I got free drinks playing video poker. Or sitting alone in my crappy apartment playing MMORPG's. I really don't have many fond memories of the place, and they usually manifest themselves into story ideas, so this week I started some character sketches for my team of over the top Gambling Outlaws that band together by circumstance to take back a big score from someone cheating the odds.

I'm probably going to write it for NaNoWriMo this year, since what I've jotted down for the first scene is kinda in the vein of Some Call Me... which was fun as hell to write. I'm planning on doing it as a series of 10-12 or so vignettes tied together to tell the story in a broken manner. Figure with each scene about 3-5k words that should work as a NaNo entry. In reality it's probably going to be a lot more scenes that are shorter, but we'll see how it goes. I've been wanting to do more Villain Protagonist type works since By Starlight. Writing from a bad guy's perspective is much more fun, since you're able to go places only an anti-hero can. No need for any moral boo-hooing before the action, just quiet regret that they're used to choking down and getting over it after the fact. I'm definitely going for a Sin City type of vibe, but that's just my love of Frank Miller, and my unashamed nature to steal from anyone that comes across my path. Rogue life for life.

In gaming news, I played through Quantum Break this week, and it was well worth the wait. When I first saw the gameplay demo, I thought it looked like a sweet looking game with cool mechanics, and I was right. I don't think I fully utilized all the mechanics I could have, but I had a blast playing the game. If you're that interested in watching someone bumble through the length of the game (including the live action TV show episodes in between game acts), I streamed it all on my twitch.tv channel.

It was nice having time to relax for a tic and kill some time with a game, but I was also busy on the rewrites front. GASP, yes I also finished chapter 7 this week. I told you I was busy. I technically finished it this morning, but you wouldn't have known unless I told you anyway. So after this fair-lengthed post, you get more updates into my writing process with the second draft of a novel I'm trying to release at the end of the year before it goes to an editor. I think I should have had a better back up plan. Release 3 books one year and then nothing the next? That's a fail. At least I've gotten a lot of new content for a non-Lilim Chronicles release. We'll see. As of now, I'm just trying to keep all the chainsaws I'm juggling in the air without losing an arm.

"Did someone say they want to lose an arm?"

Making up for lost time.

Okay, I know, I'm a terrible person, I skipped last week. My excuse, I was working on writing instead of blogging.

It's workshop time in my literary fiction class, and I've been working on helping everyone else out so much in class that I left out time for my adoring fans (pst, I mean you. Hey, where are you going?!). So, I apologize, but I finally have work to show you.

So my story I've been working on in class has been through some ups and downs, I have a couple other pieces I've sketched out, but need to go through some drafting processes to flesh them out and get them ready. But as for now, I have one lean mean story ready to rock. I'll post it next week if no further progress is made elsewhere.

Furthermore, on the To Slice The Sky front, I finally finished chapter 5's rewrite. And rewrite it was. I ended up writing in a new scene to replace boring ass exposition, and I realized that the 120 page chapter I had originally divided into 3 parts, has now become 4 parts. I may be shrinking down a lot of chapters in the future as well, and I know I have one complete rewrite of a scene coming up in the not too distant future as well as closer to the end.

I've written dozens of shorts, and I've written a few novellas, but I've never done a rewrite on a project this big. Writing a novel really is a whole different beast, and I feel that breaking it down into smaller parts is the whole way to do it without going crazy. Just thinking of writing out 300 pages worth of crap itself is a huge task. And then you have to chop it up and put it in an order that makes sense to other people and not just the fever dream it was when crapped into this world. I'm just hoping I can keep focused and actually have a 2016 release like I was hoping. We're already halfway through April and I'm still rewriting act one. How ambitious I was in January. At least work is getting done, and I'm not putting it off for a whole year like I did when writing the first draft.

And speaking of all that work, here's the fruits of all my labor for chapter 5 of To Slice The Sky as it stands now. And a bonus dog picture for missing last week.

A mixed bag of nuts and chews.

It took me three weeks, but I've hammered and banged another chapter into readable shape.

Man that was a lot of hard and easy cuts and pastes. Chapter 3 was a complete dump chapter, and still is. But you get to be the judge on whether or not it suffers for it. I trimmed about 1500 words out of it. Had to add a bit more too, but the parts that are added are necessary while everything trimmed wasn't. And this week, my efforts on this current rewrite is what you get to witness. The best part is, all of this hard work is just a foundation for something completely different later. I've already got plans on how to completely change chapter 1 so who knows how that will effect everything that comes after. But this is all future stuff.

As for the here and now, before I copy and paste some genre fiction for you, I beat Resident Evil 5 and am gearing up for Resident Evil Revelations 2. The end of my survival horror fest is coming fast. I also have The Evil Within that I'm going to play after. I've been putting it on hold to do this playthrough and it took longer than expected.

I also smashed through the current gen Grand Theft Auto V. First person mode was nice sometimes. It's useful playing online and killing people with it, that's for sure. Finally playing that puts the nail in the coffin of my huge game series playthrough I started last year. I strung together a chronological order of all the games in Rockstar Games canon (except for Manhunt, because I never played the games in the first place and didn't see a reason to start now). From Red Dead Revolver to GTAV I completed the Red Dead, GTA, Max Payne and Midnight Club series. Also in there was LA Noire, Bully, The Warriors, and all the available DLC packs for the last and current gen titles. So it was a long, fun, open world sandbox experience. And even in some of their worst games, Rockstar games will have something redeeming to them. Not many companies can say that about themselves.

I also gleaned a lot about the sliding scale of cynicism and optimism, and each franchise seems to do better the more it teeters on it. Max Payne is off the deep end of cynicism, while Bully is very fun loving and optimistic. GTA and Red Dead games straddle that line, with GTA being more moderate to cynical while Red Dead is moderate to optimistic. One could argue that it breaks down from the tropes/genres that each series is drawing from (Hard boiled detective, mobster/gangster crime, Spaghetti Westerns, prep school/college comedies) to dictate its place on the scale. But GTA definitely takes itself extremely serious about not taking itself seriously. I do have to hand it to the writing teams of each series that they at least don't pull punches. Each series is potentially offensive to anyone who doesn't want to believe the real world exists. I had numerous times while playing Bully where I'd think, "Wow, that kid's life is ruined forever". And while playing GTAV as Trevor Phillips, "This is what Rockstar thinks of its client base." There's definitely a lot of validity to the company's praise, and I await their next title.

After I finish Resident Evil, I'm looking to break things up with their other franchises Devil May Cry and Dead Rising. I've been a DMC fan since its birth back in 2001, and while I own all 3 Dead Risings, I haven't played a single one. Tsundoku for videogames and all. But my next big playthrough is going to be the entire Metal Gear series in chronological order. And since an official Hideo Kojima timeline exists, I consider that a challenge. I don't know if you've been keeping track, but I tend to enjoy putting stipulations on how I consume media. I guess I want to be told a story from start to finish after hearing it all jumbled up.

Speaking of stories, I'm done talking about videogames. Here's a chapter about a lonely drug addict and a picture of my dog eating a volleyball:

Endserenading

It's been another week, and what a week it's been.

Still plugging away at the NaNoWriMo book. I cracked over the halfway point of 25,000 words just after midnight Friday. Making the slow but steady climb to 40k by next Saturday, keeping at least a day ahead in regards to word count. It's a good thing they give out badges for this thing. I will do anything for imagined prestige and internet points. Or at least my gamerscore agrees with that sentiment.

All my energy has really been focused full force on Some Call Me... as I've been mucking about in Act 2. I really hate falling prey to the slowdown in the middle period, but when I obtain enough writing skill to pen a Mad Max: Fury Road style, balls to the walls, non-stop action thrill ride, you better believe I'll do it. Of course, while I'm totally an action genre fan, and love to write fight scenes like erotica writers make fuck scenes, I also enjoy contemplating my navel when I'm allowed the open freedom of novel writing. I hope that some day in the future that doesn't come back to bite me in the ass on a review. I can see it now... 

"Bollweg's prose is as bloated and over-indulgent as a King Crimson album. He meanders about tired concepts with hardly any new insight on the subject. In the rest of his work, he builds a house of sticks surrounded by a paper thin facade of flashy gimmicks and hyperviolence..." - Guy Someone LA Times Book Review

Wow, future me has not grown at all as an author.

Speaking of growing as an author, this week is the post of the final chapter in my latest novella, By Starlight. We've gone from Cyberspace, to the real world, and now we're in the subconscious of the Universe itself. It's now time for our intrepid heroine Tressie and the ravenous Succubus Gribelle to end this chase. Who will survive, and what will be left of them?!

I've got nothing left to say this week. Enjoy the story after the jump...

Sleepwalk

This past week has felt like a year.

Sales were actually existent for By Starlight - Before Dawn. Thank you to everyone who bought a copy in eBook or Paperback. If you bought it in paperback, you can get a free kindle version through matchbook. If you bought it on Smashwords but would like a paperback, I'll be running a promotion Thanksgiving weekend for 50% off. And while I make sure all my products are the best quality I can make them, I'm a fan of the printed word, so the paperback is the preferred version in terms of formatting and style. And it looks great on a shelf when you're not reading it!

My busy week has mostly been filled with me plugging away at Some Call Me... for NaNoWriMo. I'm at the close of Act 1 and 15,813/50,000 words in. I've also been annoying about my progress on social media already, so I'm less excited to be throwing up my hands in the air and celebrating the first week of my new novel being written.

I really should be more excited, because the story is turning out really fucking cool. Of course it's a mess currently, and being done for the word count at this point. But, there's definitely a diamond surrounded by a bunch of coal in there. I've been wanting to write something set on Mars ever since I read Bradbury's Martian Chronicles back in 11th grade English class when I was supposed to be following along in Huck Finn. And while I've read more than my fair share of cyberpunk and generic Science Fiction, I haven't really delved into Steampunk as a literary genre (really only read Bruce Sterling/William Gibson's The Difference Engine. If you have suggestions where to go from there, please share in the comments). Or westerns.

I've never read a western. Watched tons of sing-songy Gene Autry ride alongs, rough and tumble John Wayne and Henry Fonda fodder, and blood and whore drenched Spaghetti Westerns, but never read one. So translating the feel of the idealized Wild West on a planet that will kill the shit out of you if you step outside, all won by the power of your steam powered sidearms, it felt like a fun challenge. And it really has been. I've been having a blast writing it, with only one day of slogging through that dreaded but necessary exposition so far. I haven't been this stoked about writing something than I was when I first wrote To Slice The Sky.

But you didn't come here to see my rattle off things that I'm currently writing (unless you did. Did you? If so, sorry, your time in this world grows short. The collectors will be by shortly with pliers and hacksaws to make sure you never make that mistake again). You're here to read what I've already written and polished into a presentable state. We're almost at the end of By Starlight. Our players are gathered into place, and shit is about to get real as we slide into the action packed climax.

So here we are this Sunday. Part 7/8 of By Starlight.

BlastingOff to Ramping Up.

Hey there sports fans.

We're at week 4 of me posting the chapters of By Starlight. Since both chapters 4 and 5 are pretty short, I'm sandwiching them together for this post. We're at the middle of the story, getting everyone into place to then move into the ending. So, I can understand if this point isn't as exciting as what has gone before and what will come after. I probably shouldn't be saying that, but if we're honest with ourselves, no story is truly a non-stop action thrill ride. Even Shoot-Em-Up has a slow moment in the middle where Clive Owen gets to bang Monica Belluci in front of that baby they're protecting before busting caps into invading mooks. Let's not even get into a discussion about what a disappointment Liam Neeson's Non-Stop was. Let's just say it would have been better titled, "Full-Stop".

Besides the impending release of By Starlight - Before Dawn this Halloween, I'm also participating in NaNoWriMo this year. I'll be posting updates and such to this site to keep myself motivated. I'm writing the book I was planning on doing next, Some Call Me... It's a retelling of Sergio Corbucci's Django/Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo set on Mars with Steampunk cowboys. I've been itching to write this for the last few months, and seems more fitting than the other works I had planned next. Ultimately, I feel I write too slow and want to challenge myself to finish a novel in a month. If I'm writing something I feel strongly about, I hope it'll give me enough encouragement to power through and get it done.

But in the present, here is the next installments of my upcoming work By Starlight. I hope you enjoy.

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.