Ecce Sigum

Category: Life

  • Weekly Round-up, October 26, 2024

    Dawn over Michigan Street

    [ Just before sunrise, facing east down Michigan Street at the Union Avenue intersection. ]

    This past week was one of the busiest and most hectic weeks of my year, so I didn’t accomplish much that wasn’t work or class or home maintenance.

    Reading

    Currently reading Norah Lange‘s Notes From Childhood, and it is gorgeous!

    Writing

    I have changed the name of the MC in my WIP to Thomas, because “Cacophonous Thomas” rolls off the tongue so nicely. Bob, as a protagonist name, is just a little too generic.

    Weekly Writing Prompt

    Subject: Empire, Politics
    Setting: Labyrinth
    Genre: Literary Fiction

    Listening

    This year I created a playlist for my novel, and the soundtrack to The Naked Lunch was the first addition.

    Interesting Links

  • Weekly Round-up, October 19, 2024

    Painted stones fond beside the Dragon Trail at Hardy Dam.

    [Painted stones found beside the Dragon Trail at Hardy Dam.]

    This past week was hectic. Far more hectic than I would have expected on a week off. But my week off coincided with the kickoff of a new project, which I am leading, so I had to pop in to a couple of meetings when I would much rather have been walking in the woods or otherwise not staring at a computer screen or listening to other people talk.

    But I did manage to accomplish some of the things I set out to work on for the week. My house is slightly improved. Our cats are verified healthy. I am too, as of my first physical in over a decade.

    Reading

    I finished the Borges interviews, and for a change of pace picked up Runes of Engagement by Dave Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell. I know Klecha from the ConFusion science fiction convention, where we are both volunteers and occasional members of the ConCom, and he has been most helpful as I learn the ins and outs of helping to manage a science fiction convention. I met Buckell at ConFusion several years ago. He is a Righteous Dude.

    Runes of Engagement was a fun read, and light, and I finished it in a couple of days. Next I read Jack Ridl’s new poetry collection All At Once, which was absolutely beautiful. Some of the poems moved me to tears, which almost never happens. Ridl is a treasure.

    Now I am reading Norah Lange‘s Notes from Childhood, which I acquired several years ago from my subscription to And Other Stories. I might have missed this one, except that Lange is mentioned more than once in the Borges interview collection, and so was floating near the surface of my subconscious.

    Writing

    With my little extra free time I began organizing my notes for the upcoming Month of Writing. Since I am no longer participating in National Novel Writing Month, I am instead participating in “That November Thing”, an event coordinated by the West Michigan Author Alliance, that which used to be the Ottawa County/Grand Rapids region for NaNoWriMo.

    Weekly Writing Prompt

    Subject: Apocalypse, Precursors
    Setting: Battlefield
    Genre: Lovecraftian

    Listening

    Interesting Links

  • Weekly Round-up, October 12, 2024

    Poe and Pepper, living their best life.

    [Lazy Cats]

    Once again I was cruelly and unjustly snubbed for both a MacArthur Genius Grant and the Nobel Prize for Literature. The fact that I have done nothing noteworthy should not disqualify me from the selection process.

    Reading

    I just finished the collection of interviews with Jorge Luis Borges, and will likely soon start browsing my collections of his fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. So many brilliant ideas. So much brilliant writing.

    I am now reading All At Once, Jack Ridl‘s new collection of poetry which was just published by CavanKerry Press.

    Writing

    I am ramping up my note-taking and world-building for the November Project. Since I am not officially participating in NaNoWriMo until they de-shittify the organization, I am instead working with

    Weekly Writing Prompt

    Subject: Robots, Death
    Setting: Bar
    Genre: Cyberpunk

    Listening

    A little something different here.

    Interesting Links

  • Weekly Round-up, October 5, 2024

    Poe, woozy from the drugs.

    [Poe, woozy from the drugs.]

    This past week was hectic. We had to take our cat Poe to the vet to have three of her teeth extracted. She is recuperating nicely, but caring for her as she recovers has thrown off the daily and weekly routine. Therefore I didn’t manage to accomplish as much as I had hoped.

    Reading

    I am still reading through the collected interviews of Jorge Luis Borges. He is currently at the top of my list of “If you could spend a day talking to one author, living or dead.” The interviews are all excellent, but there is a notable difference the interviews where the interviewer is almost as smart as Borges, and the ones where the interviewer is nowhere near as smart as Borges. Actually, “smart” isn’t the right phrasing. “Well read” and “erudite” work better.

    Writing

    I am still planning what I will tackle in November, since NaNoWriMo, having both become enshittified and having shit the bed, is off the table. Probably a re-write of my novel-in-progress Cacophonous.

    Weekly Writing Prompt

    Subject: Colonization, Economics
    Setting: Boardroom
    Genre: Mystery

    Listening

    Kris Kristofferson died a few days ago. I am posting this video because “Casey’s Last Ride” appeared in an intense scene in the first season of True Detective.

    Interesting Links

  • 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

  • Weekly Round-up, August 31, 2024

    Something on the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan

    [ A colorful…something…on the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids. ]

    After suffering through another heat wave and humidity spike so severe it caused the corn to sweat (which just made everything worse), we are in a brief stretch of cooler weather, and with renewed vigor fueled by a couple of nights where I managed to get more than four hours of sleep, I am taking care of All The Things!

    Reading

    I finished Thomas McGuane’s short story collection Gallantin Canyon, and it was most excellent! McGuane has a fine sense for creating characters and motivations, and his writing style is quite enjoyable. I would put him on my shelf between Elmore Leonard and Jim Harrison.

    And I just finished the beautiful and heartbreaking Magical/Realism by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal. Highly recommended to EVERYONE!

    Writing

    Just some journaling. And this blog.

    Weekly Writing Prompt

    Subject: Possession, Dreams
    Setting: Ocean
    Genre: Science Fiction

    Listening

    Snort Fort.

    Interesting Links

     

  • Weekly Round-up, August 24, 2024

    Poe, helping with the yard work.

    [Our ginger girl Poe, helping me with some weeding.]

    This past week was the latest in a long streak of days in which my time is not my own. One would think that summer is a time of rest and rejuvenation, but that apparently only applies to people who are old enough to go to school and young enough to not have to work during the summer months.

    Reading

    My morning read is Magical/Realism by Vanessa Angelica Villarreal. My lunchtime book is Maurizio Lazzarrato’s Captital Hates Everyone, and my evening book is Thomas McGuane’s Gallantin Canyon. All are going well. All are excellent.

    Writing

    For the first time in more than twenty years, I attended the River City Writer’s Group, which I first visited at the old UICA space on Sheldon and Weston, back in the late 1990s. My after-work time is limited, but I do plan to attend at least once a month. Though writing is mainly a solitary pursuit, I miss the community aspect of reading and critiquing.

    Weekly Writing Prompt

    Subject: Mutants, Empire
    Setting: Lost City
    Genre: Noir

    Listening

    Fat Jon the Ample Soul Physician, “Rain Dance”. I first encountered Fat Jon on the compilation album Ropeladder 12, published by Mush Records. The album is out of print but can be heard online here and there. I listened to it a LOT back in the early 2000s as I tried to figure out what I was doing with my life. And here I am, listening to it again.

    Interesting Links