Return to podcasting

You may or may not have stumbled onto Uncle Warren's Attic #53, now available in a podcatcher near you. But he made an announcement that I'm kind of pleased about, in that OMG-what-am-I-getting-myself-into kind of way.

UW, who launched into the podcasting world with his reading of my first tome, The Imaginary Bomb, will be doing the same for my novel under construction, The Imaginary Revolution. We have worked out a weekly schedule where he will read three chapters a week for eight weeks, beginning Aug. 10 with UWA #54 and concluding with a gangbusters UWA #61 on Sept. 28.

This is partly a shameless marketing exercise and partly an incentive to keep me writing the remarkable story of Raymond Kaliber and independent Sirius IV, which I plan to inflict on the world around mid-October. As such, it may remind longtime readers of the debacle that was The Imaginary Lover. The difference between that uncompleted novel and this one is that, unlike that one, I know how this one ends. In fact, I have the final chapter mostly written already. This puppy is coming. The only wild cards that could throw off the schedule are the day-job factor and unexpected life events.

Uncle Warren's technology has advanced a bit since he bragged about the wonderful analog system he used to record the I-Bomb. That iMac of his has capabilities to do things that would have been pretty unwieldy to accomplish with the old stuff alone — but the old stuff is still part of his system. So the new novel may sound, shall we say, different from the I-Bomb.

And it is different. It's not a sequel in the sense that the I-Lover was, although it does take place in the same future universe as the I-Bomb, and there will be some references to the events of the first novel, as the time lines of the two books intersect at one point. In the first book, the declaration of independence by the encampment at Sirius IV was a subplot that partially drove the action. In this book, that declaration is the main plot.

Alas, I have not figured out a way to bring Bob Whelan, Pete Wong and Baxter Hetznecker into this story, so this is not a continuation of their story. Do you have to have read The Imaginary Bomb to fully grok The Imaginary Revolution? Probably not — but if you want to buy The I-Bomb anyway, I ain't stoppin' ya.

I heartily suggest you visit or subscribe to Uncle Warren's Attic over the next couple of months if you haven't made it a habit already. The geniuses at Richardson & Bluhm are working hard to make it worth your while. OK, we're playing hard, actually, but the result is very similar.

Richardson & Bluhm update: March

Sorry I've been a bit of a stranger in these parts; I've been working on the book project planned for April 15 release with Warren Bluhm's name on it, and the project has been altered a bit over the past few days.

Originally a collection of short stories named Wildflower Man, I told you last month it would feature two stories he wrote in the mid-1990s about a superhero named Myke Phoenix. Well, the ongoing archaeological dig in his attic revealed three more fully-realized stories, and the tone of these tales is so different from the other short stories that we've spun the book into two projects.

Thusly, we plan to release a 120-page tome called The Adventures of Myke Phoenix, which will feature four "full-length" adventures and a related mini-story, along with a shorter, and therefore more inexpensive, collection called Wildflower Man. Depending on a number of factors, they'll either come out around the same time or within a few weeks of each other.

Listen for more details in the long-awaited Uncle Warren's Attic #48, which ought to be finding its way into a podcatcher near you sometime later this week. And the Richardson/Bluhm projects scheduled for later in the year are still on course.

Of course, while you're waiting for all this, you can always purchase or download your own copy of my Imaginary Bomb, which is certainly the publishing sensation of 2008.

Quotidian be damned

I come to rehabilitate the reputation of our commentator who goes by CK. From the beginning, I saw this person as someone who is on my side, who warned me that my burst of creative inspiration upon finishing The Fountainhead would probably be beaten down by the quotidian - which, after consulting my dictionary, I interpreted as a friendly reminder that the day-to-day drudgery of earning a living in the Job Culture would tug unceasingly at my desires. This was a small splash of cold water, but I took it as helpful advice - better to hear it from a friendly voice in advance than to be surprised by it later on.

Or, to affirm that I understood the original intention, as CK wrote in response to this weekend's musing: "I was not intending to throw cold water or subtly shiv your aspirations; I was just giving a warning of what to expect when you actually go for it and start to succeed." And, in that context, it was a successful warning! And I would not second-guess yourself, CK ("I probably should have just cheer-leaded for you"), because that alternative would not have been as thought-provoking and (back to the 60s) mind-expanding as your actual response was.

Now in response to the follow-up question ("So you have had two weeks at it, how goes the effort?") - Well, that rascally quotidian has indeed gummed up the works, and the New Novel is not much farther along than it was when I first wrote about it a couple of weeks ago.

But on the plus side, my thoughts have been refined and clarified and my confidence rebuilt to the point where I am thinking, not in terms of producing one new book by the end of 2008, but four. Three (including the currently delayed but ready-to-go print edition of The Imaginary Bomb) will be comprised largely of work I've produced over the years and allowed to lay dormant, and the fourth will be the aforementioned New Novel.

The idea has been my Christmas present to myself. The execution will be my yearlong New Year's gift.

A small splash of cold water

It's an interesting time to be in the media industry - come to think of it, it's always been an interesting time, as in the old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." My entire career has been spent waiting for the other shoe to drop. Maybe I'm a jinx or maybe I picked the wrong industry, because my newsrooms have been frequently haunted by the spectres of efficiency and "this is just a business decision; you understand."

These spectres haunted the electronic media while I was part of it, with mega-mergers making local newsrooms less necessary, especially in radio - if you hook up to a satellite network, what do you need local faces for? In recent years they've lingered over newspapers. A week doesn't go by when some paper or another cites shrinking ad sales, lets some people go or hands out early retirements, and promises to do more with less. I've been fortunate - or maybe not - I've always been among those left behind to do more with less. Strangely, one person never quite can cover as much news as two people can, so we end up doing less with less. Peculiar, huh?

I am ever the optimist, and we recently had a small eruption that spilled over in other places when a commenter was seen (perhaps unfairly) as pouring cold water over my enthusiasm, but I have to caution PintofStout, who wrote in response to my Friday musing:

"I have actually thought about submitting stuff to local papers/websites and trying to swing into the traditional journalism route in order to write for a living."

The problem: We live in an era where more and more media, including local papers and Web sites, are inviting people to provide news tips, write guest columns and submit photographs. It's called community journalism, but the only compensation for all of this content is the joy of having your stuff appear in the newspaper or on the radio or on the Web.

The work of traditional journalists, people who get paid to write and take pictures, has been devalued by this trend. Enough people do enjoy sharing their views and photos that they don't care whether they're paid, and it's great to see more voices in the local paper. I just want to caution PoS and others that you may find that the path to writing for a living is narrower than ever.

The good news is the path has not been closed, and in fact no less an authority than Steve Pavlina has written just this week that working for free is a terrific foot in the door in any endeavor, including writing. Pavlina also has a couple of recent gems about how we're all self-employed and what to do about your conscience when it nags you about your wage-slave job. And the best news is the World Wide Web offers seemingly unlimited opportunities to expose your writing to the world - heck, that's how I got my long-dormant and soon-in-self-print novel out to the world.

So I'm not being discouraging in the end - I'm just cautioning you that the local paper may not be a source of FRNs. On the other hand, it just might - so give it a try. My advice is simply expect the worst so you can be pleasantly surprised when they offer you authentic compensation.

Sudsy setback

After my triumphant beginning Tuesday morning, a minor bump on the superhighway to literary fulfillment. The alarm went off at the same time this morning, I stumbled out of bed after an interesting dream the same way, staggered down to my play station (I shall refuse to call writing my Great Freedom Novel "work") and accomplished nothing in an hour or so.

Wha happened?

Reconstructing the previous 12 hours, I was struck by the fact that I spent three hours in front of the television set and consumed a greater amount of my favorite adult beverage than usual Tuesday night.

Moral of the story: If I spend that much time and effort shutting my brain down for the night, I should not be surprised if jumpstarting my brain is a major task in the morning.

Onward and upward.

The dream of the bugs, and the first step

Now that was quite a dream.

After an extended adventure, the details of which are a little fuzzy - was it a childhood frolic with a little pal or a traveling trip of a more adult nature? - I was sitting inside with a little pal. He was reading comics, and I still had a bit of the wandering bug, so I went for a walk outside. After a few steps, it was clear something odd was happening in the field near the house.

I couldn't see them as much as sense them, and I could hear a low buzzing. Bugs and beetles, lots and lots and lots of them, from one kid-horizon to the other, not so many that the ground was black with them - I could see all of the vegetation of a typical meadow - but enough that my concern was elevated. I wasn't frightened so much as extremely curious and knowing I should stay out of their way if they decided to swarm, and they seemed to be preparing to leave.

I walked quickly back into the house and told my little pal, "You should see all the bugs out there, there must be millions of 'em," and just then the buzzing rose in intensity and hundreds of bugs were clinging to the window screen. Not that they wanted to come in and hurt us, the screen just got in their way. Not black bugs, kind of a light brown and semi-transparent against the sun - at least the ones on the screen; I knew there were bugs of all shapes and sizes in that way that you know things in dreams. After a few seconds they moved on. I was glad to be in the house, because while they didn't appear to be hungry bugs, the sensation of millions of flying creatures banging into me and brushing past on the way to wherever would probably have been a little ticklish in a creepy way. Then, darn it, the alarm clock beeped.

The combination of my recent reading, and the reaction to my musings about The Fountainhead especially, motivated me to write down short descriptions of four main characters in my Great American Freedom Novel the other day. Not a lot of detail, barely half a page of an old-fashioned composition book I bought a year ago for 12 cents at the most amazing school-supply clearance sale I've seen in a long time. (When the cashier at Target rang my nine items up for $1.12 including sales tax, we both did a double take.) The main point is I know the basic motivations of four folks. I'm not sure how they will interact, their genders or what they will do, but I have a feel for who they are, and I know which one is the hero - or at least which one will prevail. And don't worry, I didn't copy Roark, Toohey, Keating and Wynand, except in the sense that they possess certain qualities in different measures, and four seemed like the right number. (Now I will have to resist the temptation to re-create a Dominique Falcon, though.) But that's probably true of all sets of fictional characters, I imagine. And the worst thing I could do is start second-guessing myself at this stage.

After the dream and the alarm clock, I lay in bed thinking how pleasant it would be to rest another hour or so. Then a sentence came to me - not an original sentence by any means whatsoever, but a sentence - "Even as a child, it was clear there was something unusual about him." I climbed out of bed, took my allotment of pills and made coffee while trying to hold onto the bug-dream and expanding on that first sentence in my mind.

As the coffee trickled into the pot upstairs (I can smell it - wait just a few more minutes, B.W.), I banged out four paragraphs. When the novel is done, we'll see whether "Even as a child, etc." is the beginning of the novel or somewhere else toward the beginning, middle or end. Maybe it'll even end up on the cutting room floor. But I have four characters, and four paragraphs. It's a start. (Do you think the groups of four represent a pattern or a coincidence?)

A friend who's going through one of those serious life's challenges that only are supposed to happen to other people sent me a note after I told him about the four characters. He wants an autographed copy of the book and time to read it, and the doctors' prognosis is a little less than optimistic about making it five years. Well, this is a guy with the spirit and ability to beat the odds, but just in case, I have a deadline. (Um, maybe I shouldn't phrase it with that word?) Anyone who works with deadlines knows how powerful they are. I'm moved that he would care enough to give me one.

And I'm started. Take that, you pesky little quotidian.