Month: September 2024

  • Weekly Round-up, September 28, 2024

    Hot peppers, tomatoes, a large pile of string beans, and many acorn squash, displayed on a small table.

    [The latest, and possibly the last, harvest from our small garden this year.]

    Suddenly here we are in the last week of September and the first week of Autumn. We finally have something approaching seasonal weather, though the weather we are having now would have been considered unusually hot only a decade ago. So it goes.

    Reading

    I have set all of my other reading aside so that I may focus on reading the collection of interviews with Jorge Luis Borges. I picked this book up back in June 2016 and it has been gathering dust for the past eight years.

    Writing

    Thought it isn’t necessarily creative writing, I did stay up late a few nights ago and write a long blog post for the monthly Insecure Writer’s Support Group blog hop. The post will go live on Wednesday, October 2. The question for the month was about our favorite classic ghost stories. I chose “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce. For why this was the story which most affected Young Me, check back in a couple of days.

    Reading the interviews with Borges has helped me sort out a few problems in one of my longer (and older) works-in-progress. I am taking notes and rearranging a few things, noting where I can remove characters who are now extraneous and adding one or two who will be central to the revised work. Though I will not be officially participating in NaNoWriMo this year I do plan to spend much of November (and October, and December) writing, and perhaps complete a first draft by the end of the year. This will only be possible because I will be able to use more than half of the previous version essentially unchanged, or only lightly edited. And if I can’t complete a draft by December 31, I would like to have it done by the end of the Year of the Dragon.

    Weekly Writing Prompt

    Subject: Revenge, Music
    Setting: Boardroom
    Genre: Mystery

    Listening

    Interesting Links

  • Weekly Round-up, September 21, 2024

    Early evening sun shining down an alley.

    [The early evening sun, shining down our alley.]

    This past week was my last week of work for the fiscal year, which ends at the end of the months. I am taking next week off in order to burn some unused vacation days and also to just…not work. I have taken some days off here and there over the preceding twelve months, but those days were filled with chores, errands, travel, and the ten thousand other things which tend to fill in the days, hours, minutes, and seconds of a day when we allow them to. Or rather, when we don’t take sufficient care to guard our down time.

    Reading

    For the past two weeks I have been working my way through my back issues of DreamForge magazine, to which I have had a subscription since 2019. Unfortunately I was so inundated with reading material at the time that I never got around to browsing more than a handful of stories out of any of the issues. So I am making up for lost time.

    I also, on a whim, pulled down Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations, and am slowly working my way through an assortment of interviews with Borges, which start in 1965 and run through 1985, the year before Borges died. I think this will lead to me pulling my down my Borges collections and reading them through the rest of the year.

    Writing

    Not much this week. Brain was full of mush.

    Weekly Writing Prompt

    Subject: Precursors, Super Powers
    Setting: Labyrinth
    Genre: Technothriller

    Listening

    Miami Vice premiered 40 years ago this past week. I can’t overstate the impact it had on my rural outsider psyche, sitting in front of the television on Friday nights all through high school.

    Interesting Links

    • The Subprime AI Crisis” (Ed Zitron, Where’s Your Ed At) – It’s time to start shorting OpenAI stock.
  • Weekly Round-up, September 14, 2024

    Looking south down the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids.

    [ Looking south down the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids. The river is exceptionally low. ]

    It was another busy week here in West Michigan, as I worked through the final week of one work project and began ramping up on another. I have some vacation time coming up soon so I want to get as much off my plate as possible so my vacation can be an actual vacation, and not just a deferred workload.

    The Harris/Trump debate took place this past Tuesday, and Harris absolutely mopped the floor with Trump. Trump has always been a laughing-stock and a buffoon, but he is also aggressive and a bully. To see him taken down in a venue where he can’t intimidate those around him, or fall back on the adulation of his bootlicks and coprophages, was  one of the more enjoyable experiences of this election cycle. His aforementioned supporters, who are all apparently suffering from terminal boot-polish poisoning, are of course saying he won, and using racist and misogynistic attacks against Harris to back up their arguments. So things are progressing as usual.

    Reading

    I’ve been working my way through back issues of magazines and journals which I have accumulated over the last decade. This week I finally opened Dreamforge #2, which I received back in 2019 after helping to fund their Kickstarter.

    Writing

    This past week I didn’t put a lot on paper. I am taking notes for some writing projects I want to tackle during my upcoming time off, but I do not hold any illusions that my plans will go as expected.

    Weekly Writing Prompt

    Subject: Portals, Possession
    Setting: Boardroom
    Genre: Weird Fiction

    Listening

    Interesting Links

  • Weekly Round-up, September 7, 2024

    The weekly harvest from our garden.

    [ The weekly harvest from our garden. Zucchini, string beans, a few varieties of tomato, and a hot pepper. ]

    Well, this was another busy week. My partner had a food booth at the Eastown Street Fair on Saturday so I spent a good amount of time assisting her with preparation, setup, selling, and the tear down. All this in addition to working a 45-hour week. So not a lot happened otherwise.

    Reading

    I finished Fleur Jaeggy’s short story collection I Am the Brother of XX, which upon review of my LibraryThing account I saw that I had read before, but as I do not remember a single thing about this book I am going to say that I have not, in fact, read it before, and that the rating in LibraryThing was a mistake.

    Writing

    Per usual, my writing was confined to this blog post and a few pages in my journal. I did put in an appearance at the River City Writer’s Group, where I presented a poem along with the first draft version, and general consensus was that the first draft was the superior draft, so back to the drawing board, I guess.

    Weekly Writing Prompt

    Subject: Dragons, Colonization
    Setting: Border Town
    Genre: Horror

    Listening

    Laura Branigan, “Self Control“. Boy oh boy, did I have a crush on Laura Branigan when this video appeared on MTV.

    Interesting Links

  • IWSG, September 2024: Incompatible Advice

    Lake Michigan, seen from the shore at Rosy Mound Natural Area in Ottawa County, Michigan.

    [ Lake Michigan, seen from the shore at Rosy Mound Natural Area in Ottawa County, Michigan. ]

    The Insecure Writers’s Support Group question for September 2024 is: What’s a writing rule you learned in school that messed you up as a writer?

    Honestly, other than standard grammar, and oddball things like “‘I’ before ‘E’ except after C”, I don’t remember any rules which might have been sent my way that really stuck. For instance, “The first word in every line of poetry must be capitalized” was disproved the first time I read a poem written after about 1900.

    The writing attitude which messed me up the most, and which still causes me some angst here in my mid-fifties, is that  writing is meant to be published. The quiet parts here being “for other people to read” and “and monetized.” With such debased motivation and viewpoint, the characters in a story are no longer living, they are performing.

    Here we can easily be pulled into the infinitely-regressive fractal layers of reality, simulation, imagination, dream, metaphor, nothing, Nothing, memory, wu-wei, etc., until Baudrillard and Laoze are fist-fighting in heaven.

    (And don’t get me started on AI [sic].)

    Writing is meant to be written. Everything else is secondary.

     

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  • August 2024 Books and Reading Notes

    In August I returned to short prose for the first time since May. It is a strange consequence of having little free time or attention that I have space in my head for fractions of large stories, but not complete smaller stories. Will need to investigate and submit my notes to the Academy.

    Acquisitions

    Books acquired in August 2024

    1. Hanne Ørstavik (Martin Aitken, translator), Stay with Me (And Other Stories) [2024.08.14]
    2. Salvage #14 [2024.08.16]

    Reading List

    Books read in August 2024

    Books

    1. Jim Harrison, Farmer [2024.08.09]
    2. Jen Haeger, Whispers of a Killer [2024.08.13]
    3. Thomas McGuane, Gallantin Canyon [2024.08.27]
    4. Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders [2024.08.30]

    Short Prose

    1. Thomas McGuane, “Vicious Circle”, Gallantin Canyon [2024.08.15]
    2. Thomas McGuane, “Cowboy”, Gallantin Canyon [2024.08.17]
    3. Thomas McGuane, “Ice”, Gallantin Canyon [2024.08.18]
    4. Thomas McGuane, “Old Friends”, Gallantin Canyon [2024.08.20]
    5. Thomas McGuane, “North Coast”, Gallantin Canyon [2024.08.21]
    6. Thomas McGuane, “The Zombie”, Gallantin Canyon [2024.08.23]
    7. Thomas McGuane, “Miracle Boy”, Gallantin Canyon [2024.08.25]
    8. Thomas McGuane, “Aliens”, Gallantin Canyon [2024.08.27]
    9. Thomas McGuane, “The Refugee”, Gallantin Canyon [2024.08.27]
    10. Thomas McGuane, “Gallantin Canyon”, Gallantin Canyon [2024.08.27]