2025 Goals - The Road So Far

Wow, we're a quarter of the way through this new year (is it even a new year anymore?), and I guess I'd better take a long look at my goals in a mirror.  Oh, and shave.  I ought to shave.

1.  Exercise 250 Days

I got in 23 in January, 24 in February, and 26 in March, so I'm on my way (73).

2.  Write 25 stories (and finish them) in '25

-1. On Your Side
-2.  Fairest (magic mirror story)
-3.  Plans Best Laid 
-4.  Door Number Three (reimagining)

3.  Put out 6th audio collection
Nyet.

4.  Publish 23 stories on Amazon

I have been very lax on this one.  This is what I have so far:
-1. Reply Hazy
-2. Christmas Day of the Dead

5.  Finish 2 "Lara & The Witch" stories (included in the 25)

-1. On Your Side (whoa, halfway there)

6.  Release "Sins of a Sidekick" novella

7.  Release "A Sidekick To Miracles" novella

8.  Write and produce three sketches ("Webtattler?")
None--didn't even finish the old one.

9.  Put out "Geriatric Protagonist"
Maybe I'll start on it next.

10.  Put out Christmas collection  
It's close to done, I just can't motivate myself to get it across the finish line.

11.  Put out 10 episodes of The Podcast That Dares Not Speak Its Name

-1. The Three D's
-2. A Notebook Found In A Deserted House

12.  Produce some paperback books and take them to a toy sale
Uh oh, I need to do this soon.  Okay, I just ordered some.

13.  Watch 50 Horror movies

Oddly, this one will be the easiest to achieve, even more than exercise (since I can watch a movie with no shoes on).
-1.  Nosferatu (2024)*
-2.  Village of the Damned (1960)*
-3.  Children of the Damned (1964)
-4. 13 Ghosts (1960)
-5.  Hell's Trap (1989)
-6.  Bloodbath at the House of Death (1984)
-7.  Food of the Gods (1976)
-8.  The Ghost Ship (1943)
-9.  The Leopard Man (1943)*
-10.  Talk To Me (2022)*
-11.  Heart Eyes (2025)*
-12.  The Monkey (2025)
-13.  The Monster of Piedras Blancas (1959)
-14.  The Thing From Another World (1951)*
-15.  Squirm (1976)
(*Denotes particularly good)

New Year, New Book

So, I finally achieved at least one of my New Year goals.  I finally published "Balms & Sears," the longest novel I've written.

I've talked about it one hell of a lot (and for that, I'm sorry*), but B&S tells the story of Alec Ewell, who moves into a new Colorado town with his grandfather, and starts at a new high school.  Alec tries to be a normal student, a normal kid, but he's not normal . . . Alec is a Balm, a person with the ability to heal what he touches.  And that ability has gotten more and more powerful over the years, but it's also gotten him in trouble, because it's supposed to be a secret.  And every time Alec uses the Balm, and is discovered, his grandfather decides it's time to move to a new city, get a new last name, and see if this time, he can get it right.  Because Alec just can't help himself, and there are people in pain no matter where he goes.

So that's the premise, and it could have been just a short story, or at least a novella, but it got away from me, new characters came in, and new subplots lifted their heads, until it was double the length of my first novel, "Into the Furnace."  I don't know how to write a novel, so maybe this would've worked better as a series of short stories, ala Dead & Breakfast and Lara & The Witch (both of which I have written, but not published, novels for).  

It took years to finish this book, so it's only fair that it took years for me to get it published.  But hey, now that this is out of my system, I can start looking for something new to work on.

Check it out HERE.

*Gosh, if only I could talk about it now that it's done, hyping it up on Facebook and Twitter, pushing it to whoever will listen, in attempts to get them to buy it.  Because that's what you have to do in independent publishing, in order to be successful.

No Problem

So, I did sit down and rework my previously-mentioned problem chapter of "Balms & Sears."  There were two moments in there that I felt went too far, and I felt it improved the ending of the book if I nipped them in the bud. 

The thing is, in real life, good people occasionally do bad things, and there are at least a few bad people out there that sometimes do something good (harder to quantify, I know).  But in fiction, because these characters (for good or ill) are all me, I can change my mind, and make things blacker and whiter.  Ultimately, I had this niggling feeling that it was a problem, and I feel better making that change.

Part of the problem is, I've never written a book this big before (unlikely that I will again), and I don't know what I'm doing.  Even now, I worry that it's not all that good, but hey, I've worked harder on "Balms & Sears" than I have on any previous work, so I'm going to finish it and put it out there.  And then you can be the ultimate judge.

I asked A.I. to create me the image of Superman lifting up a schoolbus, and I got this.

Problematic

A saying you hear often in screenwriting lectures is "Kill your darlings," a bit of advice I've heard over the years.  Now, in case you're confused, that's not a reference to what George R.R. Martin does in his novels (where he takes a character you've learned to love and he brutally cuts their throat) or what that lady in your building did when she drowned her kids in the tub that afternoon last February (after all, she caught the oldest whistling the theme to Harry Potter, and that . . . was . . . it).  No, "Kill your darlings" refers to editing your manuscript, revising your work-in-progress, and cutting scenes that you love and/or worked crazy-hard on.*

Sometimes a scene--no matter how proud you are of it--slows the pace, or confuses the narrative, or raises questions that are never answered, and they've got to go, for the good of the project as a whole.  And it can be painful, even heartbreaking, to lose those scenes, hence the Arthur Quiller-Couch ("Murder your darlings")/William Faulkner ("Kill all your darlings") phrase I'm bringing up.

I mention this because, in the home stretch of my novel "Balms & Sears," I recorded a chapter last night that seems to have been intended for the very end of the book (it refers to the climax, which I haven't gotten to yet, and as I was narrating it, I discovered, aside from it being out of place, that it is somewhat (or more than somewhat) problematic.

I don't know either.  But I like it.

Now, "problematic" is a term that has been kicked around so much recently that Big Anklevich and I have grown to despise it, because it can refer to whatever you (or a potential viewer/reader) don't or might not like.  A lot of the times, it's used to mean that something may or may not include sexist, racist, homophobic, bigoted, or closed-minded attitudes from the past, but also can just mean what it started out meaning: something causes a problem in the viewer, reader, or writer.

In my chapter's case, despite me making alterations so it takes place before the climax . . . it features a character doing something that, well, just might be too much.  I don't know, really.  I know that I wrote it around the time that, when I came to the library, I encountered a crazy person that called me "Lizardface" and freaked me out to the point where I thought . . . well, not exactly me at my most charitable.  So, I put it in the story.  The problem is, the scene makes one of the characters--a piece of work, sure--nasty in a potentially irredeemable way.  Since it's my book and I'm close to it, I can't say whether a reader would be alienated or irretrievably lost with that scene, but it's definitely possible.**

I remember a moment in the TV show "Angel" where a character did something that made me decide, "You know, this isn't something I can look past," and it really did taint the series (and character) for me until the end of time.  For thousands (if not millions) of people, when Luke Skywalker tossed away his father's lightsaber and/or milked a sea cow and drank its blue milk raw was an absolutely deal-breaking moment.  I recall people saying that, in comics, the moment where Hank Pym backhanded Janet, or the moment when Peter Parker traded his wife to the Devil to save Aunt May, or the moment when Cyclops left his wife and infant child because Jean was alive again (and then later cheated on Jean with Emma Frost) were irredeemable moments.  For me, there was a page in The Ultimates that not only made me despise Captain America . . . but never read an Ultimate Universe comic again.  And Alan Moore apparently meant what the Joker did in his Batman story "The Killing Joke" to be so egregious that the Dark Knight ends up killing the Joker.*** 

In "Balms & Sears," I wrote a character that (I think) is complicated, and presumably hard to like.  But I fear I may have gone too far, making a character that was meant to be anti-heroic into an absolutely loathe-able villain.  Not really my intention.

So, I guess I'm going to cut that bit out, despite me being absolutely loath to do so (my rewrites almost always include adding things, never subtracting things), and put it away, despite having already recorded it.  I'll have to rewrite a bit, unless I just cut the whole chapter out, but if it helps make the (potential) readers like the characters, then it's worth it.

Okay, on with the countdown (seven chapters to go).

*Or in my case, don't even remember writing, but by gum, they must be important because I spent time creating.

**I had a conversation--a truly vexing one--with a friend of mine recently, regarding the ending to a Lara & The Witch story, where he felt it was excessive or in poor taste.  I disagreed, but what he said stuck with me long enough that I did rewrite the ending, and I think the new ending is almost definitely better.

***It's told in such an oblique way, however, that DC simply let it go, as part of comic continuity, not realizing that that's what happened on that final page of the book.  Heck, I read it myself three times before ever hearing that interpretation . . . and between you and me, despite Brian Bolland's fantastic artwork, it's literally not there.

Still Working Hard (or Hardly Working)

I set two stupid goals for this month that I have been trying not to blow off: writing every day and getting my novel "Balms & Sears" to 75% recorded.

On the first goal, I have BARELY managed to write every single day this month, though the other night, I was falling asleep and I asked myself, "Was there something I was supposed to do today that I didn't do?"  I had remembered to exercise, so I figured I was in the clear, but then I thought of my writing goal, and wrote three anemic paragraphs . . . which may not be great, but still counts.  

I split another chapter in two last night, which brings the total to sixty-three, and I have thirty-eight done.  By my math, that puts me at 60% finished (which is almost exactly six hours long).  If I manage one more chapter every other day this month, I'll finish the whole audiobook, not just my goal of 75%.  

It is exhausting, though.  B&S is the longest thing I've ever written, and I am simply not cut out for this sort of thing.  There are too many characters and too many subplots and I can't maintain it all, much less keep track of continuity.  Nope, when this is done, I'm going back to short stories and the occasional novella, thanks.

Rish Outcast 288: Q&A 2024 Part 2

After a wait of more than a month, Rish answers more questions from listeners*, including insight into the Cheesy Street Chalupa, and presents a short excerpt from his forthcoming novel "Balms & Sears."

*Questions from Rob Broughton, Keith Teklits, Marshal Latham, Letruvia Kambatta, and Brian Saur.

If you'd like to download the episode, Right-Click HERE.

Because of Archive.org's problems, this episode was delayed for weeks.  To avoid this, come support me on Patreon HERE.

Logo by Gino "The Answer Man" Moretto.

The Opposite Of Blank

I was talking to Big Anklevich today and found out he's firing on all cylinders (or proceeding on all thrusters, I don't know sports talk) with his new story, already up to six thousand words.  When he asked me how mine was going, I had to return my head to its primary position: hanging in shame.  I had an idea, but no words written, no character names, no ending, no twists, no feelings of creativity, etc..  But he urged me to go for a walk (or run) and think about the story, and maybe I'd come up with something.

I heard once (or thrice) that "A blank page is God's way of showing you how hard it is to be God."*  I've always thought it an idiotic quote, because, what?  God walks around with writer's block?  The whole idea of omnipotence kind of precludes feeling dumb or uninspired, doesn't it?  But ah well, whatever gets you out of bed and on your way to work.

So, cut to tonight, when I went on my run.  Instead of listening to YouTube videos, movie trivia, politics, or talk show comedians, I turned on music (one of those ninety minute compilations that's supposed to make it so you don't have to keep selecting new titles . . . but still has commercials every three minutes).  And that has helped me thinking in the past, so I pushed Play, stretched for forty seconds, and went.

And the ideas just started to flow.  I already knew how I was going to start it, but that solidified as I came up with a character I could get behind (yeah, he's me, as usual, only much, much more successful in life, which puts him at the end of his rope).  I came up with a second character who would be important, and how that would lead to the inciting incident.  thought of a fun twist for the middle of the story, and stopped running long enough to laugh about it.  Of course, I didn't know where the story was going, or how I was going to end it, but I still had half a mile left in my run . . . and right before I reached my street, I knew how I'd end it.  

And though it's not going to win the contest, it's a tale unlike most I have written (except, ironically, the last time I entered this kind of contest), and seems like something I could be proud of.  So, in just a twenty minute run, I felt like I was staring at the opposite of a blank page, and like divine inspiration, the pieces seemed to simply fall into place.

Now all I have to do is write it.  As easy as that sounds. 

*It's a Sidney Sheldon quote that goes, "A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God." 

Taking It To The Mats

More than twenty years ago, Big Anklevich challenged me to write a story based on his premise, which was the first Broken Mirror Story Event.  If you recall, I finished my story, "Monitored Conversation," around a year before he finished his own story, "The Baby Dies - What, Does That Surprise You?"

And that's been the status quo for pretty much all these years (though never with that long a gap in between*).  But not anymore.  No, the sock is on the other glove now, kids, because Big continues to write like crazy, maintaining a steady workman's pace, while I can only manage to fart and watch YouTube with a similar frequency.

A couple of weeks ago, I told him it was time for us to start thinking of another writing contest, something we could do across both our podcasts.  He, disgusted as usual by my suggestion, asked what I meant.  I said, "Oh, something like, Write a story about evil or haunted floormats**, that sort of thing."

The mats on my car look like they've been driven over and dragged a country mile, then put back in my vehicle using a pitchfork, and I keep meaning to replace them, but I'm way too cheap.  A couple of times lately, I've thought they might be cursed and it's high-time to burn them in the backyard, like I'm from West Virginia and it's a class textbook by a woman author.  

And I thought, as I do every week, there's got to be a story in that somewhere.

I wish my mats looked this good.

Well, to my surprise, Big said, "Challenge accepted," and commenced work on it before the suggestion was even out of my mouth.  And not only has he finished his, but it's over twelve thousand words long (the crazy bastage even considered running it in the next episodes of his podcast).

Meanwhile, my story isn't even half that length, is far from finished, and for the third time in a row, just not very good.  Hmmm.

Well done, Anklevich.  Truly, the student had eclipsed the teacher, and has been sleeping with the teacher's wife. 

*Technically, this is not true, as he wrote a story about working at Little Caesar's Pizza after challenging me to do the same, and his was done a couple of years before mine (Big claims that his was written more than a full decade before mine, but I assure you, he is lying).  But that wasn't technically a Broken Mirror Story Event, since we had just said, "We both worked at Little Caesar's?  We ought to write a story about that."

**I realize that "floor mats" is supposed to be two words, but enough is enough--English is constantly shifting anyway.

Winter Breakdown

So, a few months back, I put out my 2020 story "Winter Break," even including it in my Female Protagonist collection.*  I vaguely remember, when I was recording it, finishing Chapter 5 and then noting that I'd designated the next one Chapter 8, a little odd, but just changing it and going on.

Well, this week at the cabin, I found on my laptop a file called Winter Break Chapter 6,7.  I looked at the file, and thought that for sure I'd already incorporated them, but when I read through it, none of it was familiar, and I didn't have the published version to compare it to.

I did have the audiobook version, though, and sure enough, it did not include Chapters 6 or 7 (the narrative just skips ahead, with a couple of paragraphs summing up what happened in the missing section).

Great news.

But this sort of thing happens again and again (and again and again) with me, because, as Big would gladly point out, I don't keep all my stories on Google Docs, where every time I work on one file, it updates on every computer.  And how much extra work has that cost me?  Well, enough to have written a couple more stories, maybe even a couple novels.

But today I'm sitting down and recording those two chapters**, because I just can't let it go.  If it makes the finished products even a little bit better, I guess that's a price I'm willing to pay.

*Oh no, I should be thinking about what I should put in the second Female Protagonist book now.  Do I include a Lara Demming story?  How about one of the Dead & Breakfast tales focusing on a girl/woman?  Maybe put that Princess Leia story in it, since I've never released that other than our podcast?  That story about the girl in college that tells the sorority girls their darkest secrets that I never dared put out because it was mean-spirited?  None of the above???

**After doing it, I found that it involved redoing four chapters, as I now could take out the summary I'd written for one of them, as well as as contradiction this addition created in yet another later chapter.  Such fun.  Except it is kind of fun, to do audiobooks, and nobody MADE me do it; this is all on me.

Now I Am The Master

One of the stories I've never put out to sell was "You've Got A Friend," which I wrote twenty or so years back, in major part to prompt Big Anklevich into writing me back.  

He was busy with work and family and covering up those unfortunate test subjects who mixed spider venom and Red Bull outside of Oakland at the time (suffice it to say that we wouldn't have those freeway signs that tell you what air quality is [not to mention Hepatitis-C] without his contributions), and he kept not answering my emails (this was before texting effectively eliminated both letter-writing and human interaction).  I sent him hopefully-disturbing messages such as "wHy dONt yOu aNSwEr mE, fRieND dARreLL?" and "wHy dONt yOu wANt tO pLaY wiTH mE?"* and eventually, I wrote him an entire scene of a robot forcing a well-endowed man to play boardgames with it, clearly inspired by my friend.

Eventually, he started writing me again, but one day, I took the scene fragments and crafted a story around it, and that story became "You've Got A Friend," which we ran on the 'steef once as an incentive episode.  It's the last story in my upcoming audio collection (the one that's now three years overdue), and it's probably the one I had to work hardest on, trying to make the robot voice convincingly robotic, yet still clear and understandable.

And at the very end, there's a dedication to Big, with the note "who should have written more."

But oh, how the tables have turned.  

As you know, Obi-Wan, Big Anklevich has had his most productive year ever, and has, incredibly, managed to make his word count even on days when he feels tired, unmotivated, ill, and uninspired.  He reached his yearly goal a full four months before his deadline, and even then, he kept on writing.

Me, I can see that somebody somewhere has a head cold (or just hear the mere mention of the name George R.R. Martin), and use that as an excuse not to write.

Once upon a time, Big was my junior . . . but now he has left me far behind, writing more in the past six months than I have in two years.  It's like a movie I once saw, where this dude in black armor says, "I was but a learner; now I am the master."

I think it might have been The Black Hole?

"A wolf remains a wolf, even if it has not eaten your sheep."

*Which had the Sacramento P.D. in quite an uproar before they too discovered texting, and shut down half the department.

DID I Finish Another Story Eight Years Ago?

So, I posted about "Beware Hitchhiking Ghosts" the other day, and how proud I was of my younger self for finishing a story I thought I'd abandoned halfway through.

Well, let's not start sucking each other's d***s quite yet.

I started to format the story, put in chapter numbers and such, check for ___s (which I'll often put if I forget the word for something or a name I mentioned previously) and BETTERWORDs (which I often type after a word that I don't love, but gets the point across).  And yes, it includes a "the end" at the bottom of the document, but about smack-dab in the middle, it included the two dread words "WRITE SCENES."

Nope, I hadn't finished the story.  I had skipped the part where they have a good, sexy time, and jumped to where they haven't seen each other in a while, because the happy part of a relationship is always the hardest for me to write.  So, that means I wasn't done with the story after all.

I did, however, spend about an hour writing a couple of new scenes that would take place during that section, and probably need one or two (or possibly three) more before I would have the gap bridged.  THEN, only then, a Jedi will I be.

Sorry.

I Finished Another Story . . . Eight Years Ago

I was looking through old files today, trying to find a reference to a Broken Mirror story to put in an author's note (Big reminded me we did two other BMSEs that I had completely forgotten about), when I stumbled upon a story I started writing fifteen or so years back about a guy who falls in love with a ghost, namely that ghost from the story where someone gives a girl a ride home, and she turns out to have died on that bridge or stretch of road, x number of years ago . . . on this very night.  You know the one.  I had really liked my spin on the premise--that the character from that story goes back to the bridge to see the ghost again, and again, and again--but I had struggled while writing it, and after a year or so of work on it, I ultimately abandoned it.  Sound familiar?

Of course it does, because it sounds exactly like something I would do.  So, to my surprise, I saw a file called Beware Hitchhiking Ghosts from July 2016, and opened it to see how much of it I'd written.  Was it just the first part?  The first chapter?  The first three or five or eight chapters?*  Oh, I said, to my surprise, and here comes that part: it was finished.  It had a beginning, a middle and a "the end."  And I'd forgotten I finished it.  

Which is extremely good news . . . except that now I'm worried that it's NOT actually done, that I got bogged down with the relationship part, and just skipped to the final chapter, wrote it, and left it at that.  

Except that's not what I do.  It's almost a superstition thing that I NEVER type "the end" unless the story is completely finished.**  So it would be out of character that I'd type that, without doing the heavy lifting first.  And I'm all about character, ain't I?

To be continued...

*That's what I remembered.  

**I also, superstitiously, do not capitalize "the" and "end," for some even odder reason.

Rish Outcast 282: Marvin Haggler

Rish ruminates about Heinlein's Rules For Writing, first readers, and his newest story collection. Then he and Big talk about what a terrible barterer Rish is, and present an interaction they call "Marvin Haggler."

As always, you can download the file by Right-Clicking HERE.

And of course, you can support my Patreon by clicking HERE.

Logo by Gino "Marvin Shaggler" Moretto.

Oh, and here's a link to the various iterations of "Female Protagonist:"

Digital version
The paperback version
Audiobook on Audible
And the hardcover not even my mother will buy

Is This The End?

6/7  I told Marshal Latham yesterday that I was 97% finished with "Sins of a Sidekick," and an hour or so later, I was on my way to the library to see what more I could do.  For once, I didn't dick around on the internet (except to ask it the Spanish words for a couple of terms, so I could make up New Mexico town names), and when the damned over-loud "The library will close in fifteen minutes..." announcement blared, I was about a page away from those two words, so I turned on the speed.

I was there, at the climax, where Ben's adventure is over, and who knows what the next one will hold?*

But, it didn't feel the way it usually does--which is a bright and hopeful sense of accomplishment, a feeling that while I have failed in virtually all arenas of life**, there's this one little corner where I have created something that didn't exist before, and just maybe the world is the better for it.

Instead, I felt nothing.  I had written "the end," but it felt like I had typed it by accident, or way too soon, like I was a liar or a fraud.  Huh.

6/8  So, on Saturday, I went back to the library, opened the file again, and expanded those hastily-written last three paragraphs into a page and a half, pacing out the ending a bit, filling in more detail, tossing in three more lines of dialogue.

And it still didn't feel good, or complete, or satisfying.

Huh, again.

I've mentioned it before: getting to write "the end" is usually the most satisfying part of my writing process.  It's the equivalent of hiking to a high peak and then being able to look down and see just how far you've climbed, or teaching a child to read over a period of months or years then watching him/her read the subtitles aloud on Takashi Miike movies, or working a long stretch of overtime and then seeing the sizable bump in your next paycheck, or summoning a being of unfathomable rage and hate from the netherworld and then watch it attack the neighborhood village, raping and terrorizing and eating children right and left.  

But not this time.

And what does that mean?  

Does it mean that the story is not good?***

  It might.

Does it mean that I've lost that lovin' feeling, oh oh that lovin' feeling, 'cause it's gone, gone, gone?

  It might.

Does it mean that the story is, in fact, not at an end?

  Sure, but I always do a second draft (or a third, or a fourth), but that doesn't keep me from feeling satisfaction when I write those two words.

I just found this strange.  If it don't bring you either joy or a paycheck . . . is it even real?

Something to think about.

6/9  Oh, and it's probably the second-longest gestation I've ever had on a project I've written, from starting it to actually finishing it.  When I completed "Balms & Sears" back in 2022, I felt an enormous sense of accomplishment and relief, because I started that one in 2016 or 2017 . . . and I'd pushed through to the end.

Which reminds me, I vowed to release that this year, and it's already June 7th or 9th or something.  Better get to work.

Guess it isn't the end.

 

*Well, I know, obviously, since I wrote it in 2018, but I was being poetic in asking the question.

**Including blogging, most likely.

***Debatable, right?  But probably, yeah, it isn't good.

Think On Your Sins

One of the goals I set for May 2024 was to finally write--and finish--my Ben Parks story "Sins of a Sidekick."  YEAAAAAARS ago (I think it was 2018), I wrote another installment of the series, called "A Sidekick To Miracles," and while I was writing it, I thought, "Gee, there's room for two stories between Sidekick's Journey and this one."*  So, I made reference in "Miracles" to an experience Ben had with a Reverend Elias, and logged it for possible future use.  It's something I've learned to love about writing series, leaving breadcrumbs that I could come back and pick up one day, if I ever decided to.

Unfortunately, I made the choice, years back, to wait to publish "Miracles" until after I'd published "Sins," which I did start on, back in 2019 or 2020 . . . but then abandoned it, which meant that the story I'd actually finished never went anywhere either.  Sigh.

Cut to 2024.  Big Anklevich is writing like he's in port for only one more night, and is apt to lose the use of his wiener once he's back aboard his ship, and I can't help but feel like I ought to do something other than sleep, run around the block, and criticize people who want to see BEETLEJUICE 2.  I wrote "A Sidekick's Journey" (the best installment in the series so far) in 2015, and I decided enough was enough, and that I ought to get back on the horse (so to speak) and finish "Sins of a Sidekick."

But saying I'll do something and actually doing it are two different things.

I have had a heck of a time finding the strength to write this story, partly because it's a Western and I'm out of practice (it's easier to write about small town 21st Century America than 19th Century small town America) and because so boring.  I struggled the first time with writing this story because I didn't want to spend ten thousand words sitting on a homestead with Ben Parks, wishing he were someplace else.

But that's the story I set out to write, and I've written probably eight or nine thousand of those words . . . and then I can get to the fun part.  And then the super fun part, where I write those two glorious words.

This is preliminary artwork--what do you think?

Right now, the story is sitting at 17,851 words, so, maybe 3/4ths of the way there.  Sins notwithstanding, wish me luck.

*"Sins" begins with Ben coming back from a final adventure with Lorelei Skruggs, the female gunslinger he met in "Journey," though the details of that adventure are not revealed.

"I Tell You Things, You Tell Me Things...

 ...Quid pro quo, yes or no?"

If you didn't recognize that quote, then you need to watch it again.  Little Starling, fly, fly, fly.

I write A LOT of stories.  So many that I often forget that I wrote them, stumbling upon them later and thinking, "Is that one of mine?  Is that one I finished?  Is that one any good?"

So, today I'm mentioning a story I wrote called "Quid Pro Quo," and the answers are Yes, Yes, and No.

But you know what is pretty good?  The cover Big made for me.  I mean, he may speak Portuguese instead of Spanish, he may not like Tina Turner or food on Wednesdays, and he may occasionally worship Belial, Nephew Of Beelzebub, but the man definitely has a knack for cover design.    

It would NOT create "a man and a goblin shaking hands, standing in a doorway,"
so I had to generate the two images separately.

Last week, I sent him an image of a goblin and an image of a man, and told him to combine them, so it looked like they were shaking hands.  I gave him this mockup (which I recognize is pretty shaky, but it wasn't meant to be seen, not even on this blog):

The rough mockup.

And this was the finished product:

Big's finished, combined version.  They ALMOST look like they're together and touching.

Then, I was pot-committed, as they say in Cricket circles.  

I'll be honest, I would not have published this story AT ALL if Big's cover hadn't been so solid.  He just keeps doing it, too, and that's an enabler of the finest/worst kind.

Speaking of the worst kind, "Quid Pro Quo" is a short story about a man, Alex, who gets a knock on his door by a little man who turns out to be a goblin.  The goblin has a proposal, if Alex will do him some mischief.  

And that is all.  The story can be found HERE.  I recorded it the other night, and tried to "make up" a foreign accent for the goblin to speak in, and ended up sounding like Martin Short's character in FATHER OF THE BRIDE.  On behalf of goblins everywhere, I heartily apologize.

*Write?  Yes.  Finish?  No.

"Rest Stop" One Exit Back

I first started publishing on Amazon in 2013, and did quite a bit of it early on*, but then slowed way down as the months became years.  These things are habit-forming (just ask Big Anklevich, who in 2024, has put out fifty or more stories and collections on the site, and thrice as many covers.

But I got into this habit of putting an Afterward in my stories, explaining where they came from, that I eventually started calling "A Word About The Story."  I would often record an audio version of the story, write the Afterward, then publish it, long before I started editing the audio (many of the stories just sat for years, unedited, and sit there still).

But a few of the earliest ones didn't have Afterwards, and as Big has been helping me switch out my old (and sometimes "old") covers for new ones, that all have the same font and shape of byline, I've been adding a few words at the end of them, when I can.

Enter "Rest Stop," one of my darker little tales about a man whose dog is called by something into the snowy woods and he goes after it.  I revisited the duo in a story last year, and am eager to share it with you (not eager enough to edit or publish it, mind you, but eager nonetheless).  

This was the cover it had had for the last couple of years (which isn't at all bad, even if it has the font that Big soon grew to despise):

You know, it gets the job done.

But I found another image on Unsplash that expressed the same thing**, and is the correct shape, so why not upgrade, right?

I'll try to get to the continuation of Jordan and Geronimo's story sometime this spring or summer.  In the meantime, here it is with a new cover, and a new Afterward.  Or rather, HERE it is.  Thanks.

Same feel . . . just better-looking.

This feels good, so I'm going to keep doing it.

*I also published on Smashwords, which was a bit more open than Amazon, allowing me to make some stories available for free, then distributing them all over the web.  But they required a weird formatting with no tabs and a word-for-word disclaimer that I eventually stopped doing . . . but if you think I should start with them again, I've got eight or ten stories I'd put up there and not on Amazon.

**What I WANTED was a snow-covered sign, where you couldn't read what it said . . . and I found one on Unsplash just the other day that was exactly what I needed.  It must not have been uploaded last year when I went looking for new art.  Should I swap it out . . . or just move on with my life?

Fem-Pro Available On Amazon

In 2021, in this very library, I wrote an introduction to a short story collection featuring girls and women, to be titled "Female Protagonist."  And then it sat.  And sat.  

And sat.

Is this image offensive?  While I sort of hope so, it wasn't meant to be.

But here we are, in the middle of Big's mid-life crisis, and his enthusiasm for publishing and cover art has infected me, to the point where I actually sat down again and finished putting "Female Protagonist" together.

And it was way too long.  I included the stories from the 2021 version (except for "The Night Clerk," since I figured that could go in a Dead & Breakfast collection), and then the two or three stories I had written since 2021 that fit in there . . . and then a couple more I discovered today just going through files.  And we were well past one hundred thousand words.

And that bummed me out.  I had come up with an excellent cover for it*, and I was eager to get it published (Big has put out his collection already, despite starting on his a full two years after mine), but I didn't want to have to lose stories like "The Scottish Scene" and "Underdecorated" and "Subtext."

So . . . why not a second collection of similar tales?  

I could do a Volume 2 sometime, and it was already halfway full!  I asked Big what he thought of a collection called "Female Protagonist Returns," and he counted with "Female Protagonist Strikes Back," or "Dawn of Female Protagonist."

This dookie just writes itself, doesn't it?

But having that excuse, that I could put "deleted" stories into a second collection, made it all easier, and before long, I was done, and ready to publish.**

She's SUPPOSED to be looking in a window, but the green wall or whatever at the bottom is
perfectly-positioned for a title, so that ended up my pick.  And I love it.

There are nine stories, an introduction, and one novella in this one, equaling just over eighty thousand words.  It includes such gems as "Office Visit" and "A Lovely Singing Voice," and then such--what's the opposite of a gem?  A rock, maybe?--rocks as "My Funny Valentine" and "Creature Feature," and "A Gallon A Day."  

So, if you're interested, "Female Protagonist" is available on Amazon at THIS LINK.

And now, maybe I'll get started on the old man one.

P.S. I am working on an audio version of the collection, since I have all the stories recorded . . . but I had forgotten how long just formatting and saving new versions takes (especially since I'm way pickier about sound quality than I was even before the pandemic).  I'm two hours into it, and only partway through "Lovely Singing Voice," which will probably be the story I take a five minute sample from for Audible.  I just got to the part where Tanissa's dad says he's fallen in love, and I had forgotten how awful that moment is . . . good work, whoever wrote that thing.

*Actually, for once, there was an embarrassment of riches in coming up with the image of a teenaged girl looking into a window at something glowing green.  I would've been happy with three or four of the images that A.I. dreamt up for me, though all of them had a slightly different feel (and girl).

**The audio version will take longer.  But hold me to it--you know I am eager to let things lie.

The Sweetest Words Of All

No, not "I've been a very naughty girl!"  What kind of blog do you think this is?

Famous photo of Adolf Hitler writing "Mein Cramp" on his laptop.  He was fond of Lenovos, oddly enough.

Actually, I was talking about the sweetest two words of all, the ones every writer longs for during the process of planning, drafting, reorganizing, and pushing through the uninspired quagmire that inevitably comes.  I got an idea for another Lara Demming story in March, one where she goes to Colorado and gets to see Holcomb interact with other witch-types . . . and finally, I got to this bit:

I finished another story, and that's good.*  But is the story good?

Who knows, and maybe at this point, I should pose the question: Does it even matter?  

You get better at writing by doing it, which makes it pretty much the opposite of any sport where the younger you are, the better (of course, I'm not talking about a nine year old playing basketball--we're talking adults here)(or golf, where Donald J. Trump is a world champion despite being in his late seventies).  I have written excellent stories decades ago, I'll admit it, but now I can see places where they could be improved and discover parts that just don't work, because of my years of experience.

This is my tenth Lara & the Witch story, one that takes place between "The People We Touch" and "Here To Help," and it didn't turn out as dark as I had intended, mostly because Lara Demming is a nicer person than I am.  I also found that the ending I planned for it no longer applied, and had to be entirely thrown out (although I started on a story called "Accept No Substitutes" last year that could use that for an ending, so maybe not entirely). 

I don't have a title for it, but I did try to come up with cover art . . . and did not succeed.  But Big has gotten better and better at taking two images and marrying them into one image, so it might not be a bad cover after all.  You'll find out in a year or so.

This image was a mistake, of me taking a photo of the glowing mushroom I wanted to use on the cover, to send to Big, but it caught my reflection, and when I tried to do it again on purpose, either my face or the shroom ended up out of frame.

*I should've finished it ten or so days ago, but I am easily distracted.  For example, I started this blog post a week ago.

Perfect is the Enemy of Good

Voltaire famously said "Perfect is the enemy of Good," and I've never forgotte--  Okay, that's a lie.  I've heard that quote a half dozen times over the years, but always forget it, much less who said it.

What it means is, if you try to make something perfect, it gets in the way of . . .  Actually, I don't know what it means.*  All I know is that, as I continue to tinker with my story "The Washer Whispers," I was reminded of it.

I published "The Washer Whispers," a story I wrote in 2022, about a month ago (it was apparently the first week of March, when I double-checked), and the story was finished.  Except that I felt like it was missing something.  But a lot of times, enough months or years have passed since writing it that I get a fresh(er) perspective of the story when I do my rewrite, and I catch errors or moments where a scene should've been (for clarification, tension, or just to understand the character better).  Invariably, my stories get longer in the rewrite--sometimes considerably.

This was no exception.  

I often struggle with feelings that I am an inadequate writer, or that something I write that resonates with me might not resonate with a (potential) reader, and it keeps me from putting it out there.  There's the nagging voice in my head that, maybe if I made it juuuuuuuuust a little bit better . . .

There's a scene (largely unnecessary for the book, but my favorite of the scenes) where Gil sits down with the previous owner of the house, and asks him if he ever experienced anything supernatural.  The old owner (who I never give the age of, so probably should've been in his thirties or forties, though I voiced him as though he was at least retirement age) goes from grouchy to vulnerable to emotional and then to hostile.  And he tells about his wife's experience in the house (his late wife).  I gave this guy a high-pitched, pseudo-Arkansas accent and really enjoyed performing the scene, to the point that I doubled it in length, and eventually split it into two chapters.  This was me at my most indulgent, as the information could easily have been conveyed with Gil's daughter telling Gil about the conversation she had with the previous owner, who I gave the god-awful name of Alphonse Grindler.

By the way, this is the second time writing this blog post, as it somehow saved a blank document when I was done with it over the nearly-finished one--a little glimpse into the eternity of damnation that apparently awaits me for creating images such as this one:

I was editing the scene, and discovered Gil once refers to his daughter as his sister (which is understandable, since Caroline is inspired by my sister), so I set up the microphone to re-record that line, and then thought, "I'm going to add a bit of clarification in another paragraph in this scene," and did so.  I took an hour to do this and then splice it into the original recording . . . but I noticed that my voice quality was not the same between sessions (doing Gil's voice would absolutely wreck my vocal chords after an hour or so), so I went back and recorded a few other lines around it so it would be less noticeable.

I vaguely remembered there being a bit about Dreyer's ice cream, and when I looked in the document, sure enough, there was a section in there that didn't match what I had recorded (initially, he gives a single sentence to explain what happened with his wife, but at some point, I rewrote it to find out the whole story).  So, I plugged in the mic yet again to re-record that bit, and remembered a callback to the ice cream later, so I just decided to go ahead and re-do the whole rest of the chapter, through to the end.  I had not counted on doing so many takes, though, and by the time I reached the end of the chapter, my voice was absolutely cheese-grated.  

I only had four more sentences to go, but I was now coughing whenever I tried to read anything in that voice, so I decided to jump to the last line in the chapter (because I had changed the word "August" there to "summer," having discovered I used August as a metaphor for hot weather three times in a story that takes place during the schoolyear).  I redid that line, then ported it over, cleaned up the audio, and stuck it all together . . . and darn it, the two voices didn't match.  

Should I record it (yet) again?  'Cause it's still not perfect.

I found what I thought was a plothole (or at least, a plot . . . hairline fracture), and thought I could fix it by a single line by the voice from the dishwasher** saying, "There are things I'm not allowed to say."  But instead of sticking that into an earlier scene, I decided to create a new scene (a little one) where he asks the questions that I think the audience would ask, and she tells him nothing.   

Originally, I had a bit about it being too bad that my story's not about an alien being emerging from the dishwasher, 'cause this cover would be perfect.  But I'm just gonna let it sit here this time.

I mentioned Caroline, the daughter (sister?), and that reminds me: one time during the rewrite, I realized I had started calling her Carolina, so I did a Search and Replace for those, changing them all to Caroline***, but while I was editing the audio, I discovered there had been a "Carolina" that slipped through.  So I set up the mic again and re-recorded that bit, then re-published the text version.

But I started to think about that, and decided to put in an intentional Carolina around the middle of the story, as sort of an Easter egg that would affect only me (if this were a screenplay, I'd include a parenthetical that said, "Note that she says CAROLINA instead of CAROLINE," so they'd keep it in).  But that meant I had to set up the mic again and re-record that bit, then clean up the audio and splice it into the finished Chapter 10.  Worth it?  Probably not, but this is art, not science.

The story was getting better, I thought, but I kept finding things to fix, things that weren't perfect, and that's the whole reason for this blogpost.  Voltaire, you see, was right.

Yes, M. de Voltaire in a kitchen.

So, the story went from twelve chapters to fifteen, and from a bloated, overlong short story to a novella on the thin side.  And as Shelly Winters used to say, "It's better to be a skinny novella than a fat short story."

Still not quite perfect.  Yet.

*It certainly flies in the face of my religious upbringing, so maybe that says something.

**I made the mistake of calling the story "the WASHER whispers," not realizing that it tricked my brain into thinking it was about a washing machine, and oh, there were about nine examples throughout where I called the dishwasher the washing machine.  I hope you can forgive the, oh, eleven other uses of that word in the story, as well as the fact that I'll now spend the rest of my life calling the appliance by the wrong name.

*** Apropos of nothing, I once had a co-worker I quite liked named Carolina, and have never known a Caroline.

P.P.S. A week later, and I discovered the section I had highlighted to re-record had stayed highlighted, even after I re-re-re-republished it.  Whoops, still not perfect.