Friday, December 27, 2019

Asymmetry by M. K. Dreysen

This was the post where my story Asymmetry was originally published. Look for it now in M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 5, coming October 2020.

a little later and you'll find the story "Asymmetry" available for your reading pleasure...

Thursday, December 26, 2019

...I couldn't quit if I wanted to...

Lonnie Mack and Stevie Ray Vaughan, Oreo Cookie Blues, songwriters Lonnie McIntosh and Mike Wilkerson

Friday, December 20, 2019

Neverland Disorder - A Kelli Hench Mystery by M. K. Dreysen

This was the post where my story, Neverland Disorder, was originally published. Look for it now in M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 5, coming October 2020.

Stay tuned for the first story in an occasional mystery series, introducing Detective Kelli Hench. This will be part one of the Neverland Disorder series.

Thursday, December 19, 2019

World Saxophone Quartet: Night Train, Jimmy Forrest, Lewis Simpkins, Oscar Washington songwriters

Friday, December 13, 2019

A New Old Thing by M. K. Dreysen

This was the post where my story, A New Old Thing, was originally published. Look for it now in M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 5, coming October 2020.

Since it is Friday the 13th, if you wait a bit, you'll find "A New Old Thing" - a story of that which we know nought of.

Thursday, December 12, 2019

...those foolish kids can't be ready... Los Lonely Boys, "Well Alright", Songwriters: Buddy Holly, Jerry Allison, Joe Mauldin, Norman Petty

Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Ok, Stephen King, I enjoyed the hell out of The Institute. But, I have questions.

Well, one question really. And no, this isn't a fanboy reaction, it's an honest question: how in the hell did you get through this book without making, so far as I can tell (and I'll be the first to admit I might have missed it), any allusions to Firestarter?

I saw Bev's Diner (which is a different story, yes)... and I waited... and waited... and never caught a hint. Not even a joke about George C Scott in a ponytail. Nothing.

It doesn't take anything away from the story, at all. The first chapter grabbed me, and I was hooked all the way through. But now I'm wondering, mostly about the discipline it took, or the editor's careful razor cuts, to make it through this kind of story without the kind of allusions to the rest of your works that we've come to expect. This isn't criticism, it's just that... it's kind of like coming to Grandpa's house for the holidays and finding out he's been listening to the latest Lizzo record.

A little different, that's all.

Thursday, December 5, 2019

Deep Miners

This was the original post for my short story Deep Miners. Please look for it in M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 4, coming August 2020.
Coming later here at this fine establishment, "Deep Miners", a story about what happens when you land somewhere they're waiting for you.

Father, please hear my confession

Dire Straits, The Man's Too Strong, Mark Knopfler songwriter

Friday, November 29, 2019

The Day The Big Top Came Down

This was the original post for my short story The Day The Big Top Came Down. Look for it soon in M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 4, coming August 2020.
And for your reading pleasure this turkey-induced weekend, return here soon for "The Day the Big Top Came Down".

Do you love me? Like I love you?

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Do You Love Me?, Martyn P. Casey and Nick Cave, songwriters

Friday, November 22, 2019

The Dark Art Of Starlight

This is the original post for my short story The Dark Art Of Starlight. Please look for it soon in M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 4, coming August 2020.
Stay tuned later this evening for "The Dark Art of Starlight"...
... it was the roughest place, I'd ever been ... Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, Tin Pan Alley, Bob Geddins songwriter

Sunday, November 17, 2019

Degrees Of Shade

This was the original post for my short story Degrees Of Shade. Look for it soon in M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 4, coming August 2020.
Heh. (If you're a carpenter's kid, an electrician's kid, etc, you'll have variations of this I'm sure...)

Words not of wisdom but of fair warning: Never tell a plumber you've had a shitty day... I once had my grandfather describe to me the joys of eating a sandwich when you're covered in it.
...never heard a word I said... Paul Robeson, Lazybones, Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael songwriters

Saturday, November 9, 2019

The Things On The Barrelhead

This was the original post for my short story The Things On The Barrelhead. Look for it soon in M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 4, coming August 2020.
Incoming soon, a story for this week called The Things on the Barrelhead. Blame it on Phillip K. Dick, at least a little, at least a little, but it's a what if? that I see, if not possible, then as a dream of HR departments soon to come...

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Ah, and here we are in November, a few frosty mornings to hint of things to come. I've been fortunate these last three days, I've had time away from the day gig, and time enough to sit and do nothing but read. It was fortunate timing all around. We had a busy week last week, for a variety of reasons, so the three days recovery was a delight. I finished three books these last few, two by L. E. Modesitt and one by Seanan McGuire. The two by Modesitt were the latest in his Recluce series, now closing in on 30 years running and 21 books at time of writing. I've read most of the rest of Modesitt's books; I picked up The Towers of the Sunset in Waldenbooks way back when, and have been keeping, more or less, since. I enjoyed this latest cycle in the Recluce series, Modesitt's going back and thinking through some nuggets of the series that appear to have been on his mind for a good long while. The hints have been there, at least. From these, I've learned to let those things that look like they dangle, unresolved, age well. I've known of it, that this is one of the joys of a series, the idea that you as writer get to go back and look for the clues you've left yourself. These last three in Recluce, Mongrel Mage through the Mage-Fire War, are a good example of that. In fact, the whole series is a good example of that. That said, if you're interested but don't know of Recluce, I'd suggest a few different starting points instead of these last three books. The Magic of Recluce, The Towers of the Sunset, Fall of Angels, or Magi'i of Cyador would all be good starting points. Just be wary, if you're the type who gets hooked on intricate, long-running series, and you haven't already read Modesitt's works... well. You're in for a treat, dear reader. Seanan McGuire is, by comparison, newer to me as a reader, though she too has a fair list of works to dive into. I've got Discount Armageddon and a couple others of her books sitting on my shelves, and I've read at least a few of the stories she's published with Lightspeed Magazine and a few other places. In this case it was one of McGuire's newer ones, a standalone called Middlegame, that caught me, and how. What did I learn? The joys of the occasional inside joke (red right hand, ahem...), pace and the joy in it. Don't stop to explain, that moment will come. Most of all? Go for it. Get tangled up in the idea and let it run. And since Middlegame is a standalone, I don't have to give any warnings in terms of diving into a new series. Middlegame is a treat.

Thursday, October 31, 2019

Trails In My Path

This was the original post of my short story Trails In My Path. Look for it soon in M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 4, coming August 2020.
Last story ahead of the witching hour. This one I stumbled onto while thinking of the intersection between power and loyalty, between those born to it, and those who've built their own place in the world. As with many of my stories this month, this one covers dark territory. So I set it loose in the last breath before midnight.

I call it "Trails in My Path".

Sunday, October 27, 2019

A Lucky Man

This was the original post of my story A Lucky Man. Look for it soon in M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 4, coming August 2020.
And may I introduce you to the Luck Man? He jumped into my head last year, and refused to go away until I'd written this first taste of his story.

I call this one A Lucky Man. It is the first of many tales he has to tell. 

Friday, October 25, 2019

Down To The River

This was the original post for my short story Down To The River. Look for it soon in M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 4, coming August 2020.
This one... I call this one Down to the River.

It's been waiting for a time. I wrote it last year, about this time. In a rush, a hard fast thing from title to last word. A story of ghosts, of a couple of different types.

Monday, October 21, 2019

A Good Watch, Wound Tight by M. K. Dreysen

This is the post where the story A Good Watch, Wound Tight by M. K. Dreysen was originally published. Please look for it in M. K. Dreysen: Collected Volume 3, to be published June 2020.
This story surprised me, reader.

All of them surprise me at some point in the proceedings. Which I enjoy, I do.

This one came on out of nowhere. I wrote down the title, and next thing I came down to the end and it was finished.

Most of all, I think this story concerns what you have, what you get. And...

what you tell yourself you'd change. If you could.

I call this one "A Good Watch, Wound Tight".

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Last One There For The Exhibit by M. K. Dreysen

This is the post where the story Last One There For The Exhibit by M. K. Dreysen was originally published. Please look for it in M. K. Dreysen: Collected Volume 3, to be published June 2020.
For my next story, I stumbled across a place and time where power and family dynamic twists the mind and alters your view of the world. This one involves not so much intrigue, as greed, and the desire to satisfy it.

I call it "Last One There for the Exhibit."

Sunday, October 13, 2019

Like Tom Waits With A Head Cold: A Story of Academic Misbehavior by M. K. Dreysen

This is the post where Like Tom Waits With A Head Cold: A Story of Academic Misbehavior by M. K. Dreysen was originally published. Please look for it in M. K. Dreysen: Collected Volume 3, to be published June 2020.
For your reading pleasure this fine October, another little story. This one's about the ways and means. no.

This one's about long knives, and what happens when research gets personal. I call it "Like Tom Waits with a Head Cold", and it's a little exploration of the wrong side of academic life... or, at least, how badly such things might go wrong.

Tuesday, October 8, 2019

One Step Too Far: A Tale of Gina's Hunters by M. K. Dreysen

This is the post where One Step Too Far: A Tale of Gina's Hunters by M. K. Dreysen was originally published. Please look for it now in M. K. Dreysen: Collected Volume 3, to be published June 2020.
Next on the list for October reading, we return to the world of Gina's Hunters. I call this story "One Step Too Far", it's a rumination on what happens when a person takes one too many trips to an old well.

It's also about what happens when an old hunter finds out what the young hunter's tricks are.

Saturday, October 5, 2019

And So It Begins by M. K. Dreysen

This is the post where the story And So It Begins by M. K. Dreysen was originally published. Please look for it now in M. K. Dreysen: Collected Volume 3, to be published June 2020.
Here's another story for your pleasure this October. This one's another betrayal, in this case a grand one. This is what happens when you, and by you here I mean "You!" on the grand cosmic scale, leave yourself open to that most fundamental of urges.

Revenge.

I call this story "And So It Begins." I think, when you read it, you'll guess better than I what might start in this little system on the edge of nowhere...

Tuesday, October 1, 2019

It All Went Down On The Flight To Cartagena

This is the post where my story, It All Went Down On The Flight To Cartagena by M. K. Dreysen, was originally published. Look for it now in M. K. Dreysen: Collected Volume 3, to be published June 2020.
Let's begin the way fall has this year, with a little story of intrigue, and subtle betrayal. A tale of things that happen when you're expecting something else.

I call this one "It All Went Down on the Flight to Cartagena."

Thursday, September 19, 2019

Tropical Storm Imelda winds down to her denouement, leaving us with one hell of a mess. State of your humble correspondent? Well, and grateful that we didn't catch the fourty plus inches of rain that appears to have come in south of Winnie. Or the thirty plus inches of rain they caught out toward Conroe and New Caney.

We got our share; about twelve to fifteen inches of rain where we are. So far, I think Beaumont seems to be having the worst time of it, in terms of houses flooded. Out toward Kingwood and Humble, they've had some houses hit. We just watched a piece on the local news about a family that just returned to their home three weeks ago, after being flooded in May.

Galveston is underwater, Lake Jackson and points south are catching the last remnants of the current go 'round. Things will heat up tomorrow, and then we'll have the thermal thundershower effect to pour a little salt on the wounds.

The way of it, September's our time here. When we get just the right kind of weakness and all the moisture in the Gulf surges to the beach. Imelda spun up and sucker punched us in record time.

And we all get to relearn the lessons. Don't get on the roads if you don't absolutely have to. That's a big one, but it's the hardest one to stick to.

I spent part of the afternoon wondering how I was going to get my little car to our daughter's school. The teenager's been driving our larger vehicle, the 4wd with a high center, while I've got my little runabout. She called, worried, not because the water was high enough to bother her or the vehicle she's driving, but because she was going to be leaving along with a bunch of other kids who've barely learned to drive. And the parking lot was ankle deep.

So I sat there, wondering whether I could make a Mini swim... and then I asked her just to wait a bit, let the parking lot clear. She did that and came through in flying colors. A small victory.

Stay safe out there, my friends, and let's get through the next few with a little smile and a lot of patience.

Wednesday, September 18, 2019

I'm going through and prepping my October slate, which you'll be seeing shortly (insert Cryptkeeper's giggle here) my fine, lovely readers.

And I realize that one of the real fine things, one of the good things, about short stories is that they cover the world. Worlds. A little of this, a little of that. Sure, these are all written and then chosen with a view toward the month's theme. Treachery most fowl, er, foul. (I don't have any ducks here, that I recall. Should I fix that? I might fix that, there's time yet.)

The storm, Imelda as it happened and I've been imagining closets full of shoes for some reason, at least for our yard has been a blessing of late season rain, little more. Other than not getting on the road to the day gig this morning, which I'm thankful I can do when I need to, there's been, knock on wood, little more than street flooding so far.

That could change. There are parts south of me, toward the coast, that have had close on twenty inches of rain over the past day or so. And there are parts east and north that look to be getting in line for another twenty inches or so of rain in the next twenty-four hours. It'll be a white-knuckle few days and that's no lie.

So I've a fair few stories in the pipeline and grass that's looking to turn into a monster for a while. All in all, not too bad.

Monday, September 16, 2019

a week slipt past me; this is that time of year, so I won't dwell on it.

The heat's dwelling enough as it is. A guest staying, making itself comfortable, that's the heat. I wouldn't mind necessarily. Except for the part where it looks like we're about to get one of those reminders that September's our worst month for storms. A low lingers south of my own self; the weather crews are whispering their warnings.

Rain's coming. Days of it, it's moving in off the gulf, and it's coming in that slow, driving way. The one that whispers of storms past. Harvey, Allison, the ones that came to stay and didn't mind sending lots of water in from the south.

I think now of October again. The first cold front. I wonder if this year is one where October needs a little help. A little ritual for crossing the void.

Dear reader... I may have a few stories that could help.

Not ghost stories this year. I look at what I've wrought, and what comes to mind here is... betrayal.

Strong word, that. One of the haunting ones, too. I see stories, new ones, of Gina's Hunters. Of the Queen of Night and Shadow. Of a grand battle that turns on plasma and blasters and the one person behind a console who'd never thought she would have a chance.

Of documents forged and set in a delicate place, only... well you'll have to wait for that one. Another, of an owner who's misplaced her sense of the other. One of professors and the studies they admit not.

There are others, too. A ghost story, just because. And, for a taste of something different, someone calling himself the Luck Man.

All in all, when it comes in, warm or cool, I will be ready to greet October this year. And maybe give that wonderful month a helping hand crossing the ways.

(In the meantime, check out my book links, over to the right, or ... ok so I don't have a link page yet for all of them. If you're on a tablet or phone or otherwise, try these links for my books: ny Open Wounds Series, Through the Foggy Dew, The Boyar's Curse, or Automorphs.

And I will make sure I get a complete page put together for those stories by the end of the month...)

Tuesday, September 3, 2019

I remember, as a kid, thinking there was something magic about the Bahamas. Something special.

Oh, not just about the usual stuff, the beaches and the beauty and the rest of it. All of that was part of Wild Kingdom, or Cousteau, as far as I could tell. Never been there. Just watched on t.v., heard stories.

Watched the way the storms, hurricanes, never quite had the impact they had everywhere else. I told myself it must be because of the construction. The cinderblock houses, everything built to handle the storms. The Bahamians know, they're ready.

And now Dorian is telling me: be careful of your myths, your stories. They don't hold up. Not when the storm comes. And stays. Takes four miles an hour and a perfect cut across the islands. Sand bars don't take anything from a storm. Not even a little bit.

I think I'll go look at this list and see which avenues I might be able to help the Bahamas, and the other areas in Dorian's path. Recovery's hard, yep. The things that matter tend to be difficult, I guess.

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Contemplating the nature of our fallen world is a pastime, stipulated.

That said: I have a smile on my face for at least a couple of reasons this week.

One: N. K. Jemisin tweeted a rewatch of the original Highlander movie over the weekend; Clancy Brown dropped in a couple times... this is a moment of joy.

Two: The Mouse House appears set to allow us the honor of hearing Queen Latifah sing Poor Unfortunate Souls. This too is a moment of joy.

Thursday, August 15, 2019

I think I said before that my current story surprised me. By showing up sooner than I'd anticipated, mostly.

The broad idea I've had in my head for a few years now. So maybe this story was like a gumbo, or a roast, taking its time in a slow fire. Getting to just right.

Or I could be deluded. Writer's privilege either way.

And the story surprised me again today. I finished it, in one big long fell swoop. I knew the ending was coming up, and then once I started working on it, the real meat of the thing came into my head. And there was no stopping after that.

So that's done.

And then I said to myself, oh, there's on more line I need to add. And I went back to where I thought I should add that line.

Turns out, I needed to remove a line or two, not add. And then it really is finished. Edits and so on to go, but that's that.

Which is a good feeling, indeed.

Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Book Journal, cont'd

Another of my recent reads, Medusa Uploaded by Emily Devenport. Em Devenport, let me say thank you, first, this one was entertaining, I enjoyed it immensely. I'm down on the list to find out what happens next, with the Medusas and their counterparts, and the mess they've found themselves in after crawling out of darkness.

Let's see, brief reminder to self: generation ship story with a main character whose selected herself, or been selected, as guardian/avenging angel? of those who make the ship work. There's a lot packed into this, so where Oichi ends up at the end of this is staring into a brand new abyss.

What did I learn? Don't be afraid of tearing into a scar; don't hold back when your character tells you something about themselves that should make the strong quake and the fearful hide in the shadows. I've questions, of course. But they're the good questions, what ifs? and how's that work? that wait for the sequels to answer.

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

Book journal stuff. These aren't reviews per se, and they are all books I've either purchased or checked out from a library.

Basically, instead of keeping notes in a paper book, I'll take a swing at doing some notes online. Trying to keep the ideas and impressions and things I've learned from a given story in mind.

Ok, enough with the throat clearing: F.T. Lukens' The Rules and Regulations for Mediating Myths And Magic is an absolute hoot. I had an absolute blast reading this first book in a series, and I say thank you, F.T., because I enjoyed the hell out of my time with this little crew.

What'd I learn? Go for it. Dive in and go for it, once the story gets rolling don't get in the way of it.

Yeah, it's a high school with magic setting and so what if this is all things a reader, as they say, "familiar in the art" can guess where we're headed.

But then, with a good roller-coaster, you can see everything you're getting into. Does it matter when you've got your hands in the air climbing up to the drop? Oh, hell no it doesn't.

I've questions, of course. There are pretty big bows tied up on some aspects of the story, where others are set up beautifully. I want to know how all these things are going to work out.

And, just how F.T. is going to untie the bows that wrapped up the happy ending stuff. Or whether this will be necessary at all (see above about just going for it. F.T. can go along just fine, I suspect.) Either way, I look forward to finding out what happens with the Monster of the Week...

Sunday, August 11, 2019

It is a truth I suspect often observed, and, on occasion, written of: get a good day's words in, in fact a good week's worth, and then you'll have a couple of days that make the thought of crawling, exhausted, sweaty, cramping, to the keyboard, an effort beyond human ken.

At the moment, my hamstrings hate me, and I've got that phantom space surrounding my head that warns me of what a fool's game it is to be working outside in the August heat. We have well and truly hit the beastly days, the days where walking outside around 3pm is akin to hitting the pavement with your face.

I have evidence of this in one way. It's the height of wasp season, so an idiot (i.e. your humble correspondent) with a can of spray and a train of geckos following along behind for the easy stunned prey on offing cleared our porch two days past. Something of an easy chore after the good day's writing, and a time to chalk it up as a moment of fun and games and terror.

The geckos do a good job, but there are places and particular breeds of wasp that get the best of them in this heat. I feel for the upset stomach at least one of the brave little beasties is facing: the red wasp struggled, stunned, and the lizard king's get sprang on him in his last efforts...

And then yesterday was devoured by marching band duties. Our daughter's band is busy every year; this year's a big travel year, so we've a few more efforts than normal. The morning we devoted to building props needed for the show. Which was brutal enough, but then the evening was a fundraiser. Pasta night.

This is the second time I've cooked this year, the first one was hamburgers and hot dogs in the spring concert season. We had two pits going, mine was my charcoal pit, and if you've ever cooked a hundred hamburgers or more on charcoal, you know the flame-grilled madness I was surrounded by.

It didn't get out of control, I knew what I had coming and so could stay ahead of it. But every batch on the grill had that special moment, where I'd lift the lid and bow to the inferno a'raging.

Last night was similar. Pasta for three hundred plus, sauce and meatballs and all the rest.

It's been a while since I fought the forge-fire volcanoes of a commercial range. We reached one point where we had three big pots of water plus a big pot of sauce on. Where the three pots met, the flame arose in blistering aspect.

It took me a few passes before I noticed that I'd burnt the hair from my right arm. Fortunately, the left hand pass was over the griddle, so that part of my mind that knew better switched my act to left-hand stirring.

After I went and scrubbed my arms. No one needed my burnt stubble in their food. Good habits come back, eventually...

I need to remember to look for an easy-to-stop at blood center. I was spoiled, for years, I need only pass a blood donation bus at begging time. Or, at a different job, all I had to do was walk a block or so to the permanent location.

It's harder to do certain things when you don't see them every day. Donating blood is like that. When it's easy, of course. When I have to think about it, the months pass, the jobs take more time. And then I look up and realize how long it's been.

So I have to do a little homework now and look for a place that's easy to get to. Same thing as with my gym membership. I had to carve out the time, experiment with it, until I found something that I could more or less consistently.

And forgive myself when I don't get to it as often as I'd like to. At least I'm going.

Thursday, August 8, 2019

It's been a good couple of days for me. I've put in words on the current work in progress; given the schedule I anticipated, I ended up well more than I would have bet on. Set the small goals when you see the whirlpool ahead, and then when you're on the other side of it, downstream and drifting again, it all looks a bit better.

But then I look ahead and see another whirlpool. Which is about normal, I guess, for this funny old world.

I pass by comments and outrageousness and weird things. There's a hundred and one billion things that float up, it's a noisy old world these days. There are always significant things going on, but which ones?

Where I am at the moment: observe, feel the emotional response, and then store it away. Remember event and response, because they go together into tomorrow's story. Or maybe the one after that, who knows? Objectivity ain't in it, but then again... yeah.

One of the other things I'm up to is reading more. I've a few recent books that I need to talk about here. As a reminder to self, of both good books and good writers, and of what I picked up, learned from these works they've wrought.

Of course time has its judgment, so we'll see how soon "soon" is on that front.

Tuesday, August 6, 2019

I didn't write anything here yesterday; today is for Toni Morrison. She left us yesterday.

I can't remember not having a Toni Morrison book in my house, my mother's house, growing up. She was there, as much as King or Straub or Oates or the rest of that particular generation. A constant.

Beloved, when she sent that out to the world, came at a time when I was moving on. Because of school, to "literature", and at that particular point, Toni's work wasn't quite yet "literature". That came later.

Then, she was an itinerant professor, a woman of letters. But not yet the Nobel Prize Winner. That too would come later. Mom bought Beloved as soon as she saw the trade paper edition. I came to it later, after Toni's Prize, when I wanted to discover where an old friend had gone to in my absence.

I haven't kept up with Toni's work after Beloved, other than her occasional letters to us the broader public. But she was always there, just as she always had been. Always will be, oh this magic we do.

I believe Toni Morrison read herself into existence. Yes, writer, yes editor, yes dreams sent to Heaven. But in her work I see most of all: a fellow reader. Engaged, terrified by, lost in, awed in the fact of the words, the story, the stories.

Before I wrote this, I went and dug up something I'd remembered as being fairly short, a quick read from Toni. She wrote an introduction to Huck Finn, once upon a time. I remembered learning something from Toni in that piece. Of how a writer tangles with another's work.

How she tangles with it, again and again. From fear, to understanding. And then dives into it all again. Because what was and what is and what may yet be are not the same; she tangled with Huck Finn, and learned something.

Taught me: of reading, and worrying over it. And then sitting down, so that the words should come and hold these things together. I don't know what tomorrow will be, not having Toni there.

But I am glad that there are words from her that I have yet to read.

Saturday, August 3, 2019

And my third job begins in earnest today.

Third job, if you haven't seen me discuss it, in this case refers to our daughter's marching band season. First job the day gig, second job writing, third job band season.

So, as for the past two years, my hours are starting to get slim. The writing part, the fiction writing, I'm comfortable I've a handle on. The past two years have been a lot more productive on that front than I'd feared.

The blog part on the other hand, and the publishing part, are the ones I know will end up being chaotic. Mostly, I know that's on me to figure out the fifteen minutes here, ten minutes there. They add up, those little pieces, ten minutes to do some edits, or write a letter to an editor, put together a submission, this that and the other thing that go into the side of things others see.

Frankly, I've fallen behind on that front. I've a queue of finished work; that said, they're waiting for me as I get there.

The current work in progress, well. That's a book I didn't expect to write; no. I've known for most of the past six years or so that this book has been waiting for me.

I just didn't quite have it in my head, yet. Except, now that I think about it, I'd sketched out roadmap, and would you know it, this book is coming in right about where that roadmap said it would.

I finished the previous book I was working on sometime in June. Wrote a few shorter stories, and then a couple weeks ago, I realized it was time. Sat down, put in a title, and off I've gone. When I sit down, the words come.

Which is one hell of a feeling.

I'm one project at a time at the moment though; I have another roadmap in my head, so there are other projects in that map, but for right this moment, it's the story that's my writing world. A few more weeks, I think, and then we'll see where I am.

Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Completely random stuff that I am dumping the brain contents of:

If you code compilers, or develop your own computer language, people look at you funny, even in computer science departments.

If you call yourself an Alexa coder, and get into the Amazon Accelerator program, you're part of a thirty-one billion dollar industry with a 200+ million dollar fund throwing money at you.

Two points to ponder: (1) "voice command" approximates to "natural language compiler". Or, "natural language programming", if you're unwilling to stretch to compiler. Yet. So no, this isn't a trivial comparison. and (2) my oh my, how far we have come.

And how far we have to go. I have a great appreciation for the hard work it takes to get Alexa and Google's equivalent to do their things.

And I am yet frustrated when I experiment with trying to get our little gadget to stretch beyond its boundaries. That's ok, that's ultimately why I bought the thing, to play with, just as I play with computers via keyboard.

But I can see where this will go. Oh, so close we are...

****

dGaSometer: a universal, hardwired human wetware device, but each implementation having slightly different calibration. dGaS = don't-Give-a-Shit, i.e. don't-Give-a-Shit-ometer. To measure your individual level of don't-Give-a-Shit.

A dynamic device, re-calibrated as needed, just as with any useful laboratory device.

The scale is often set by the most-unfirable person of acquaintance: the one least likely to get fired because no one else in the entire local quadrant could be found to do their job, not for love nor money.

Urinal scrubber (often the owner, depending on the particular location...), PortaToilet cleaner. Plumbers in the get your hands really dirty end of things, especially anyone driving a RotoRooter truck or septic-tank service truck. Chimney sweeps were the classic case, certainly in the Mary Poppins lens. These are the folks whose dGaSometer scales are likely fairly well pegged, compared to the normal folk of their acquaintance.

These are the things you think of one the way home from the day gig. Not because I had a bad day (no, really), but because I thought of a constellation of current and former co-workers, and it just sort of coalesced in my head.

And yes of course this will show up in a story someday. How could it not, I ask you? Once it's there, baby...

****

The LightSail 2 mission gallery is here. This is very, very cool, no longer animation we're getting near-realtime views of the actual sail in action. Along with some great looks at the Blue Marble.

****

So: Sun, IBM, DEC, VAX, Oracle in its first iteration, etc etc, were just way-too-early adopters?

Just shuddering, still, at the fact that we've come so far, only to reinvent client-server architecture all over again. And the licensing/fee structure that goes along with it. Oy ve.

Writers: this matters in some subtle ways. Don't let the writing you think of as important get caught in some cloud server, where it'll end up belonging to someone else because you didn't catch the clause in the click agreement... Just so you know, there are some cases where you can't use Microsoft Word to write for-profit (student editions, certain types of enterprise editions (universities, schools, libraries typically), and some other special cases are the examples I remember at the moment), so this is already a hidden issue, even though it's not normally enforced.

This will eventually come to a sticking point: the first time someone saves their script or novel to a cloud, one that's got an advance attached, and the big money tangles with each other over who owns what.

Thursday, July 18, 2019

Ok, I'm not one to defend Robert Altman. One, he doesn't need it ( MASH for the win, people); two, I'm still aggravated with Altman over Popeye; three, I happen to enjoy the Lucas Howard the Duck movie, so you might take my opinion with a grain of salt.

That said, I'm going to disagree with Dean, and his commenters, on ambiguous endings: see here for a good list. Note what's on the list: The Thing, for example. Blade Runner, for another. 2001: A Space Odyssey (don't leap to Blame Kubrick (TM: Stephen King): remember that Arthur Clarke co-wrote the script, and in this case, the movie preceded the book, or at the least Arthur wrote the book as the movie was being produced.)

Ambiguous endings, in other words, aren't just a gimmick, they're part of the foundation of SciFi and Horror. Flowers for Algernon. Frankenstein (book, not movies). 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dune, if you understand what Frank Herbert has laid out as a trap for his Kwisatz Haderach. The Amber series and Corwyn's path that leads to... where exactly? Alien, and Aliens. The Terminator.

Meaning, calling ambiguous endings a cop-out, or "literary", sort of misses that the best of our work, in this little corner of the imaginative arts, actually lives and dreams with the ambigious ending.

That said: you have to do the work. All endings grow from the story that's been told. There can be no half-measures, here. And now we're back to the real question: Did Altman and company do the work in the rest of the picture to make that ending work?

Dunno, I haven't seen Countdown, so I can't say whether it would work for me personally. I think, from Dean's reaction, that we can assume that, for most, Altman and company didn't pull it off, at least not at remove?

Would it have worked in 1968? When none had yet set foot on the moon? But we'd lost Apollo 1, and Grisham, White, and Chaffee along with it. I think maybe, in this case, Altman might have been playing with a loaded deck. The world had set the stage for him, built up the anxieties, and he may have taken advantage of that; in that setup, I think perhaps the idea that we could send someone to the moon and then hear... nothing. Ever again, one way or another...

Yeah, I wonder now if Countdown is a case where art divorced from context has lost something in translation.

And, I don't think ambiguous endings are something to aim for. So I find myself agreeing and disagreeing with Dean, again. Most times, most stories, the well-developed, well defined ending comes out of the story, and should just be allowed to happen.

But then, I've taken my own spin on this kind of thing. I like to think I did the groundwork right, but who knows.

For all I know, my taste-ometer broke on Howard the Duck, and trusting my opinion on matters of art is a dubious business...

Sunday, July 14, 2019

Thoughts on the precipice of the next obvious economic experiment...

(Note to scholars: if this is your area, understand that I am yet a visitor here, and likely haven't met your work yet. These are then my naive thoughts ahead of digging further; if I've said the obvious or the laughingly wrong it's simply the nature of my daily reading being in my own little plot of the work. AKA forgive me my sins, as I forgive yours...)

(Note the second: I have a necessity in the daily grind for reading economics literature, but at what the pros would consider a superficial level; I need a certain level of operational and general mapping. The details are usually not part of my practice, except at the micro level. So when I say "I don't see..." I mean the blogs, the Economist, the popular level of discussion, as opposed to the discussion taking place at the journal level. In economics, however, the popular discussion level has an outsized influence, certainly compared to my daily working area.)

Coming up, we're all going to be part of an interesting experiment: a very small, easily identified perturbation at the macroeconomic level.

Here's what I mean. It is a fact of the 401K/IRA construction that, at age 70 and a bit, the IRS and tax law hold that the accounts must begin to be liquidated. Not all at once, the liquidation is scheduled over a certain timeframe, a percent here, a percent there. In my calculations, I find that the aggregate value of a 401K account can continue to grow, for perhaps 15 years or so, to say age 85 or so depending on starting assumptions, even though the account is being sold out of in IRS terms.

This simply reflects the rate schedule in current IRS guidance. The schedule is set such that the overall disruption is mild. At first, the effect is simply to slow the rate of growth, beginning at age 70.5 and going forward to about age 85, and then finally turning over and becoming a net sell-off of the whole 401K account for the years after.

You might get a slightly different result, it depends in detail on how an account is structured, bonds versus stocks versus cash, etc. So please don't take this as a hard result, merely one possible result among an ensemble.

Ok, so what? Every year, some population hits 70.5 and has to sell off their accounts.

Well, the Boomers born in 1950 hit 70.5 next year. Further, the Boomers used the 401K structure more than the age groups before them, relatively. They represent a slightly outsized net population increase in the overall retirement account balance.

So, when the 1950 cohort hit the 70.5 line:

1. One would expect a net, small, broad-based (across stock, bond, cash, etc markets generally) move toward sell across markets, compared to current. Something like, instead of the S&P 500 growing at 10 percent per annum, growing at 9.5 percent, or similar.

2. One would expect a net, small, broad-based increase in tax receipts at the federal level, compared to baseline. Perhaps half a percent or so?

(1) is simply that, in aggregate, there will be more sellers than there otherwise would have been. Taken in aggregate, this should be a very small (hence, perturbation) change, noticeable only in aggregate, measurable only by careful work.

(2) I get to in the following way: a retiree's income drops, currently on age 65 or so, to a first approximation by about half. Social security and so on. And then, at age 70.5, said retiree has to increase their total income by selling off a percentage of their 401K. On net, the effect expected would then be an increase of tax receipts by a percentage of the difference between the Boomers and their immediate predecessors, net of market movements, etc.

3. The boomer bulge is approximately 15 years in timeframe past 2020; the effect will be, in fiscal terms, short-lived.

4. The effect will likely be small enough so that Brad Delong, Paul Krugman, Tyler Cowen, Scott Sumner, and their colleagues will have years, nay decades of fun arguing over "Who did what to Whom?"

5. We haven't seen the end of the data-driven macroeconomist (i.e. Emi Nakamura) winning the major awards, relative to the model-driven macroeconomist. In fact, we're just beginning...

Saturday, July 13, 2019

musing on the subject of this John Scalzi article.

Ok, class is a weird thing. From observation, my English friends giggle whenever North Americans discuss class. We in the U.S. think money = class; the English have a completely different view of the matter.

An example: Kate Middleton, and her family, in the U.S. would have been considered upper class, due to their wealth.

In England, Kate's family are firmly middle class, due to not having titles, land, etc. They're shopkeepers, not matter their money.

Similarly: Paul McCartney may have a sir attached to his name now, and billions to go along with it. The title dies with him, however, and money will not buy his children membership in the upper classes. Unless, like Kate, they marry into it. Or hold onto their property and money long enough to drift in on indifference.

So, U.S. considerations of class are different. Using middle, working, upper, poor, may be necessary in some sense, but the uses are colloquial, and vanish on looking too close, as fog in our fingers.

That said, there are serious upper classes in the U.S. and Canada. (Mexico is a different category; the Hispanic countries of the Western Hemisphere have a class legacy that lives in a much different category. Similar but different enough so as to be dangerous if you get it wrong. 'El Jefe', as one example, has many different connotations. Using what might be a familiar jibe between friends with someone you don't know very well can be troublesome.)

The Roosevelts were one example. The Hearsts, briefly. The Fords. In South Texas, the King Ranch, in south Louisiana the various families that established what used to be Hibernia Bank and the Calcasieu Marine Bank.

I know of one family in Louisiana that owns a stretch of land that is difficult to describe, in terms of extent. When they work cattle, they move their herds from close to a beach on the Gulf almost all the way to I-10.

Without once crossing out of their own land. Or, for that matter, opening a gate in a fence on their own property.

And the King Ranch makes them look like dilletantes. And there's the Parker Ranch on Hawaii. We're talking true wealth here, self-perpetuating, and on a scale that's almost unimaginable, except by the very peak of the dot-com crowd.

If, for example, Microsoft or Amazon were to crater tomorrow, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos would still be personally wealthy, by any measure. But their ability to pass a self-perpetuating cycle of wealth to their children would be significantly decreased. Simply because it takes a fairly impressive amount of heavy lifting to turn the stock wealth in a single company into a broad-based, bullet-proof wealth system across all types of markets. I would imagine those two have, simply because they've had plenty of time to do so.

But is that the same thing as owning 100,000 acres of working ranch? And banks and construction firms and... Time will have to tell.

And this type of upper class has, contrary to common belief, existed in North America since the beginning. Consider the Brahmin class, in Boston. I've seen only the briefest glimpses of this group, via friends and acquaintances, and they too are, for the most part, a self-perpetuating class of wealth and privilege. Not necessarily the kind of wealth you'd associate with Ferraris and trips to Monaco, mind.

But their kids don't have to worry about college; they've been "Down for Harvard" since birth and don't have to worry about how to pay for it. When they get out, even if they don't go into the family business, which may or may not exist in a concrete sense, wherever they move, they won't have to worry about a down payment on a house, or a car note.

These aren't bad things. Think about it this way: given the opportunity, wouldn't you want to make sure your children and grandchildren don't have to worry about how to pay for college? Whether they'll be able to afford a house note? A car, health care, the basics?

Not kept in style, but the basics taken care of. That's what, at the heart of it, many of us, I observe, consider the American Dream to be. Not wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, but rather being settled. Able to back up our kids when they screw up, give them that little bit that lets them get started.

In current terms then: Working class means that, if you had the grades to get into college, then you had to either earn a half scholarship, or pay for it yourself. Maybe you took community college first, saved up a little money stocking groceries at night, and went to A&M or UT when you hit your junior year.

Maybe you got lucky and hit an apprenticeship as a plumber, took your master chit and started your own business with a line of credit from the credit union, held against your retirement fund from the union.

Upper class means that you went to a good college. But you didn't have to work, the parents had it covered, including the apartment off campus and the car, except you worked a little just to have a little extra cash on hand.

Middle class? Scholarship kids, the full-ride type, on campus all through because that's what the scholarship would pay for. Medical school or law school, maybe architecture, a grad school that got you paid right away, the day you walked out with the ticket in your hand. If engineering, you took the right internships and walked into a job waiting for you the day you graduated.

The upper classes maybe didn't even need the job, but there's always one available when they need it.

The working classes don't know anyone, have to fight through the two-hundred to one ratio of applications to job openings. Scrape by, put it together, go from job to job and never quite know when the axe is going to fall.

Middle class, there's always a rumor of a good step up, maybe as a negotiating tactic, maybe just as a way to make sure you land well when this current one gets cut.

Upper class don't get cut from jobs. By this point, they're working for their family company. Or, teaching somewhere, working for an NGO, at a non-profit, somewhere the vicissitudes can't touch, and the little bit of family support means they can handle the poor salary by other means. Again, not massive wealth, just the kind of backup that makes things easier. Or maybe massive wealth, that can be there too, but it's the security that matters here. (Consider: 200k invested, roughly a thousand a month in interest: if your grandparents had put that in a trust for you, would a thousand a month matter to you? Would it have mattered when you were, like I and my wife were, struggling? I know for sure as hell how much a thousand a month would have meant. Would still mean, for that matter, because we've got a kid getting to the point where college bills are on the horizon. And let's face it, when you think of wealth, does 200k sound like 'wealth'? Another example, could you scrape up time and 80k against a 400k loan, to start a business that, if things went right, in 2 to 4 years would pay off the loan and generate something like 200k per year? I couldn't begin to afford this, and I doubt any of the people in that article could swing it. But that's the kind of thing that the upper class can afford to do: invest time and effort to perpetuate wealth, in what look like small ways; if you've conditioned yourself to think of a million dollars as what it takes to get into the upper class you'll miss the real thing when you see it.)

And notice: it's only the upper class that's self-perpetuating. The middle class is an accident of being in the right place at the right time. The working class is the default: always the poor schmuck getting pissed on and being told it's raining.

This is description, I could generalize to other connotations. The retail grind, farming, fishing, construction, each has variations that you can see. Who owns what, who signs the time cards, who shows up drunk on Thursday and gets shitcanned.

Wherefore the unnerving, then? Why would the upper-middle class then feel a little anxiety? Worry? Maybe the sand shifting beneath their feet, a little?

The verities, no longer solid?

It happens to every generation, I observe. Collectively, that moment when "Who, where, what, how?" percolates through the subconsciousness. The Boomers: 60s rebels, 70s disco, 80s yuppies and worries about interest rates and tax brackets, nineties gas prices and holy shit you mean our kids could get caught up in another war?

The greatest generation: the war, and the aftermath. The cold war and all its collective anxieties, turned up to 11 and yanking the knob off...

GenX, us: we will never see a dime of social security. The universal realization, I thought, when we were getting started. I never met a member of my rough age group who didn't know this, down deep in their bones.

Ah. Now I wonder: did some of us begin to believe again, just a little?

The GenX middle class, in my little categorization, above. The ones who'd skipped along, put all the anxieties aside. Maybe discounted them, since those who couldn't keep up were the ones voicing them (and forgetting how they'd once shared these concerns, if only academically).

And the clouds are on the horizon. The first hints that the leading edge will be at 80 percent of current social security benefit, when we retire, and from there it's all downhill.

Medicare's finances even worse. Most states barely scraping Medicaid now, Obamacare/ACA something something oh God how are we going to get to retirement? What happens if the stock market crashes again?

In other words, we seem to be about where the Boomers were in 1990, 1991, 1992, when the recession that kicked Bush the Elder out of office took hold. The Boomers had been through Black Friday, the recession and the war in combination, plus gas kicking up from 95 cents per gallon to a dollar and 25 cents or more, and staying there (25 percent jump essentially in one summer) and their anxieties kicked into high gear.

This settled. But how many dot-com revolutions, or similar, come along in a lifetime? My generation and that of those immediately following look to be starting to question the next phase of life, and where we go from here.

It's no surprise this would come in the NY Times, or that they'd interview the upper-middle class for the article. That's their audience, it's who they're speaking to.

I don't speculate in political terms here; these anxieties are far broader, deeper, quieter than the playing at politics can handle. How will it play out?

Now there's the question for the writer...

Friday, July 12, 2019

A minor ritual, with small but well-meant power, and well known among those who know: turning the audio setting from bluetooth to terrestrial FM on the way home from work, that last day before your weekend, because you don't have to listen to the traffic from whichever mapping system you use, as well as your streaming tunes.

****

Barry looks like a suckerpunch, a switchblade in a bar fight kind of storm. And it will be. Not our storm, but I'll be keeping an eye out for the aftermath, where we can help. Because I've family there, sure, but also because it's always our storm, in one way or another. This particular one, I'll be looking for senior living spaces, community centers, dialysis centers, homes for the disabled, those sorts of places. The places where poverty, medical need, and age can all meet.

Those are the places where people can't get out, no matter how much they might otherwise want to. They're stuck there, until the waters come. And the water always comes. We'll see it, at least a few of them, with stretchers and helicopters or boats and the desperate.

They'll need help on the other side. After Harvey, for example, one of the local retirement homes took more than a year to get its permit back, because of the unexpected flooding. In the meantime, the folks that lived there were at sea in a world even more unknown than they'd been.

Food banks, of course. Medical supplies, water, the basics, they'll all be needed. We'll be doing what we can, and hoping it's just a wet hot mess this weekend, and not something worse.

It can always get worse.

****

I like this article, by Soraya Roberts, a writer I just found today, but with a voice I enjoy. I agree with her, of course, as do a lot of people, that Hollywood is currently in a boa constrictor's nightmare: swallowed the pig and now stuck digesting the thing. They've hit the big time with the worldwide blockbuster, and they're not sure how to do some types of movies they've done before.

That said, Netflix and Amazon and BBC America have their own opinion on this matter...

Um. And I kind of think writers have an opportunity here; there's space for those with a voice and an idea and a little work ahead of them...

****

I wonder what Charles Hill thinks of the Russell Westbrook trade? My suspicion, when the Rockets originally brought Chris Paul on board, was that this was the end state; but then, I went through it with the Rockets and Moses Malone, Ralph Sampson, the Hakeem era where the more they added, the farther from getting back to the championship they got, Yao Ming and the never quite made for prime time players... yeah, I didn't think Chris and James were going to fit together.

Not for long enough to matter. That they've made it the past couple of years seemed as far as they could go.

My question is, have Russell and James learned enough to live together again? There's history there, too. It speaks well of James Harden, I think, that he'd sign off on trying again. And, I'm assuming, Russell the same thing. They're pros, granted, but us on the outside looking in never quite know where the frictions can't be overcome.

I'd have asked for a center, though.

Thursday, July 4, 2019

The yearly garden is always an experiment. Quite literally, if you think about it, given that you're never quite sure what the dirt is composed of. Where you got the compost, who made it, where did they get all the sand, anyway, how much clay, how much rain...

We're past tomato time, the vines went from producing to yellow and dying. The cucumbers continue to bear, and they've hit their stride in terms of flavor, too. Green beans, there it looks like I've another couple of quarts to take up, and lord help us the sage has gone ape this year. Peppers, too, it looks like we'll have a fair few quarts of those. I haven't tasted those yet, it'll be interesting to see whether we're "Hmm..." or "Holy shit" with jalapenos this time.

And something there is that loves bok choi this year. We got a few young greens in March, and I've just let them have it ever since. Same thing with the tomatoes, I'd estimate we might have had one in three or four that weren't buggered by some little bug before we ever got it.

But we've had rain consistently since February, in a rhythm and a rhyme we've not had since we moved in. A sign perhaps of the decadal oscillation patterns in the Pacific, I'll take it gladly and say thank you.

My story garden has grown, as well; I looked through my list of works awaiting in the queue this morning for the first time in a bit. It tickles me, that list. And it reminds me of the work ahead, but for today at least I look at what I've done and am proud.

And I finished a story this morning. So I think I'll go and let my smile stretch a mile, and get ready for an evening on the patio, with hot dogs and charcoal and the sounds of the neighborhood. May you, dear reader, enjoy your own evening in such a way.

Sunday, June 30, 2019

I start this entry, and now I see it's the end of the month. Since this is, in a nominal sense only, a 'daily' record (see the origin of weBLog...) the idea of a given month having anything more than bookkeeping value... well it's an accident, but hey I don't mind a bit of coincidence on occasion.

In my case the Great Forgetting has been a combination of writing and publishing. The writing hasn't been completely by the wayside, I finished the manuscript for a book just before the month started, went into a two-week break, started a story and finished it, another story and finished that, and am in the middle of a third. So, that part's gone well, and I think another three, four weeks of short story work lie ahead of me, in the immediate.

It's the publishing part of things that's stalled a bit. Given the choice, I'll take it. The daily work is sanity in motion. In keys and words and the streams of thought composed therein.

Sanity, and energy. Health, dreams, love and hate and boredom too. Work and life. All of these things, writing.

Other notes, though? My wife and I have enjoyed Good Omens, well done Neil Gaiman, it's a joy long in the making. I never dreamt that this would make it to the screen. Any more than I, once upon a time, expected Hitchiker's Guide to make it to the screen. Some things, I figure, aren't meant to be.

I guess the only thing left to be made into a movie or TV show is A Night in Lonesome October, and if some brave soul ever tackles that one I wish them all the best.

What Good Omens the Amazon Show reminds me of are those magical Doctor Who episodes on PBS, or the radio Hitchhiker's Guide episodes, or the radio Star Wars plays, the delightfully odd British productions that I enjoyed but never even tried to explain to people like adults. It brought back a little bit of the magic, Good Omens did.

Kind of like what happened when I discovered the book, going on 25 years ago. Now that I think of it.

I've revisited a few old friends in story world, recently. These aren't reviews, call them writer's notes as I read through fun stuff.

Peter Straub's Shadowland, one of Peter's earlier works that I only recently tackled. This one's... well parts of it are dated, but I passed those with only a nod. The heart of the story grabbed me, about half through, and I was done for, in for the threepenny ride and enjoying every bit of it. This one reminds me to tuck things away, you never know when they'll come in handy, rememberances.

I read Clive Barker's The Scarlet Gospels, one of those books you stumble across walking through a bookstore, grab it, and next thing you know you're putting it down at the end, wondering where the time went.

It's a book that requires homework of the reader.

It's a book that makes me think about author and character and the relations between them.

I read Thomas Harris's new one, Cari Mora. There's a tipping of the hat relation here to Hannibal and that series, but it's only in passing. The story here is all new, and I had a ball getting to know this one.

I think this one appeals more to my appreciation for the movie Manhunter, Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs the stories before Silence of the Lambs, the movie, came out and recreated Hannibal Lecter for a different audience. There's a sense of possibility, and beginning, here, and open vistas.

And of the little things that we see every day.

I tucked into Rose Madder, one of Stephen King's early nineties books, and enjoyed the hell out of it. This one I'd bounced off of in the first attempt, when it first came out. This time though, I picked it up and dove right in. Strong stuff, but what intrigues me here is Stephen tangling with Myth, as opposed to myth. He does that, on occasion. Sort of like poetry, I wonder if Stephen's got the occasional moment where he hears and sees the hints on the pages, and then it's clear the runway fellas because it's takeoff time.

I think of big things here, and how to be afraid of them. The stories of Old. Be afraid, be fascinated. Take them apart, on occasion, and breathe on them until their eyes show the blacklight fade... 

Saturday, June 22, 2019

I write this just after Juneteenth, and in the midst of Pride Weekend. And, just a couple weeks before July 4th.

Now, the observation that follows is, I'd not be surprised to discover, unlikely to be original to me. Still, there's an interesting symmetry I see here, between these freedom celebrations and the 4th coming up.

Mardi Gras, Carnival, isn't a single-day celebration. Both actually begin at Twelfth Night. The balls begin, the celebrations, in ones and twos, building little by little, until the parades begin some two weeks before Ash Wednesday. Each ball, each parade, celebrates a different group, a different view, a different story.

Freedom has many aspects, she is no monolithic creature. My story is not yours, yours is not your neighbors. This is a beautiful thing, where I stand. And to have a celebration in many parts is, I say it, a wonderful thing. Let us tell stories, let us dance and sing and grill and drink and find out what this new world means. To those who've passed their stories on to us, and to those we tell our stories to. 

Sunday, June 9, 2019

noodlings of a day:

grand slam season, especially Rafa in the finals, and we get to test whether the sleep timer on the electronics can beat out Rafa's match. The vast majority of the year, two hours is plenty, until it's F1 season, or racing season, or tennis season...

I've a handful of thought balloons on this article, about the universe, cosmology, and a couple of old ideas dating back to at least Feynman and Gell-Mann (M G-M just passed away about two weeks ago as of this writing):

1. Always with the unanswerable questions. If he did nothing else, one of Hawking's most useful contributions, in my observation, was to have recognized cosmological imaginings can be connected to real predictions, at least around black holes (Hawking radiation, if you're following along). Most of the rest of these sorts of things in this end of the pool are a long, long way from finding their way to testability. Well, except for those of us who write science fiction... 2. Ok, now a question. Hawking and Hartle were interested in the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, most especially "What's the simplest solution that looks like something we can all call a universe?" And they came up with one. With a boatload of assumptions, sure, but there's no question the solution they generated has a vaguely recognizable utility with respect to the thing we look out into the night and gasp over. How then the Turok et al (TFL) paper, which says "No, we like our approach much better" and then go on to show that Hawking/Harle's solution doesn't show up for a different set of assumptions? And, in the TFL assumptions, we find a solution that doesn't appear stable, doesn't even vaguely resemble a universe we experience... here where we're just us theorist chickens, gang this is fun, but I'm not seeing why I shouldn't default to "interesting but not useful, yet." 3. Related: I have to cry foul on the use of imaginary here. We're out here where the isomorphism to the matrix algebra (or at least a Wick rotation?) should be inherent; dragging "i" back into it smells like drifting to anthropomorphism. That it leads to what looks like a dynamically unstable long-term solution with unrealistic density distributions makes me wonder if we've gone too far here. Summing over all histories should mean summing over all histories, not just the ones that "look" or "feel" "right". I'm not saying HH didn't have a similar issue, but now we're into the realm of counting "who's used the least assumption" and that's where we can only come back to comparing against the empirical observation...

Completely different note/observation. Our daughter is taking a couple of extra classes this summer. She's trying to line up her regular schedule over the rest of high school. The math class she's taking is "the one". That is, the one that every budding mathematician runs into, the one that makes you work.

It goes like this: early classes, disciplines, and the young math geek can "see" the solutions easily. So she writes them down, and enjoys the experience. Dad nods along, waiting for the moment... when the solutions she sees don't make any sense. And she has to learn to work through the algorithms anyway. That's the tough part, because she's now having to learn habits Dad has been years pointing to, saying "You'll need to be careful, these tools will help." And now it's come. Easy becomes hard, and hard-headed now gets in the way.

It's short term but delicate. I went through it, from observation it happens in all disciplines, not just mathematics. The key is navigating the short term storm in such a way that she doesn't spend years "hating math" because of it. Which can happen. I don't think it'll be an issue here, she's only showing simple frustration. But I'll get to do some extra homework this summer, as well.

Theorem: science is two-sided, rational map and empirical map. The two go together. Yet, from observation, one or the other tends to get ditched. Get too married to the rational argument, the beautiful logic, without murdering your darlings, and it's amazing how easily one can ignore that you're having your nose rubbed into it by the universe.

Or, on the flip side, only "results" matter. And if you've never seen this one go wrong... one failure mode here is to jump from "result" to result and not realize the incidental successes are essentially random until you hit the wall.

I put empirical results in quotes there because data is noise unless there's an a priori rationale. Hypothesis and measurement are iterative, and skipping over one or the other just makes a mess.

No clues, here, except that learning to be humble in the face of uncertainty is often key to complex endeavors.

This is a reminder to self, a question to ask Slash if I ever get the chance.

Slash: have you ever considered annotating your pix and your mom's pix into a collection? I love imagining the stories. You get pictures, and your mom (I'm assuming, given what I've read from your autobiography about your mom, about the pix of say, Jimi Hendrix or Clapton and Dylan and Townshend and all the rest) took pictures of the music and entertainment industry, from a point of view that no one else in the world has.

Certainly not when you take into account the sheer breadth of time and people your and your mom's collection appears to cover. Your instagram is a treasure. Just by seeing these pix, I get glimpses of your world.

I just can't help thinking that, if you were interested in the project, a little detail on the photos as a collection would make some future historian's life. Call it your retirement gig, maybe, but I'd pay good money for the coffee table book you could build. Music, movies, all of it.

Hell, make it two volumes, the music world and the movie world. The behind the scenes pix from the movies it looks like your mom worked on would make, say, fans of The Shining drool, if I read those pictures correctly.

I also can't help thinking I'm not the only one who's ever asked you this, so please ignore this if it feels like I'm trying to obligate you to something. I'm just a fan and admirer who's fascinated by the stories your pictures hint at.

Friday, June 7, 2019

It's always hard to lose family, isn't it? Kin, chosen, born to, we're interwoven threads. When a thread is gone, the weave continues. Just with something missing. And something added. Memories. Don't forget those, they're the part that, I find, makes the whole. Illumination comes in many forms, after all.

It's difficult to talk of family with outsiders. Have you ever stood at a funeral, or the wake, listening to some distant cousin tell a story, and asked yourself "Where was she for all the weekends? Sunday dinners? Shitty diapers and chicken pox and..."

I know that's not fair. We are all of us weaving our own tapestry, trodding our own path. It just hurts in the moment sometimes. Me, I have to put aside talking about family in those moments. Too close to it.

So I can't talk about Dr. John, who left us. Probably late for a gig, a session maybe. Piano duel, with Professor Longhair and Fats Domino.

Ellis Marsalis is, maybe, the last of that branch of the family. The stride and the roll and the keys.

I'm not blood kin to Dr. John. Not that I know of. But musically? Yeah, Doc's family. The Neville Brothers, the Marsalis family, Dr. John. Professor Longhair and Fats, and later Harry Connick, Jr. Pops, aka Louis Armstrong, and Allen Toussaint. Family. If you knew what to listen for, going back home, you'd look for a flyer, maybe, or listen to the wind, and Allen might be playing Tipitina's, or the Professor would be at the Jazz Fest, or there'd be a Halloween party and who knows who'd show up.

Find the right parade at Mardis Gras, when I still went, and there before he climbed up on the float Dr. John might be holding court.

When I saw him there, he did that by listening. No big stories or personality, just ears and eyes and the songwriter's observation.

Go on Doc, play it for us. We'll dance you on, and you sing us home.

Thursday, June 6, 2019

The way my wife describes Melissa Etheridge and KD Lang singing You Can Sleep ( here) is that their harmonies woke her from a dead sleep.

Mostly, it's just one of those perfect moments, for me. How they got the recording and the voices that clean... combination of the hall and the crew and the voices. They hit the harmonies and the song just about as perfectly as could be.

I get a kick out of watching Melissa. She's not ignoring KD... she's about as close to just closing her eyes and listening to the lady over her left shoulder as you can get, that's all.

Another one where you can hear Melissa's voice in harmony is with Jewel, singing Foolish Games.

These performances I've known about for years. But then today, my wife and I stumbled across Latifah and Melissa... singing The Chain. Oh my.

Wednesday, June 5, 2019

That face when you've found just the right level of uncomfortable for supporting jowls and neck twist...

Monday, June 3, 2019

Reflections on a moment

All the same, no.

Similar, yes. Permutations and quantum separations. Distinction without a difference. Passing from this to that.

Valleys of thou shall nots. Or maybe so's. Fall into that valley, or perhaps climb down between the yucca and the spines. Watch out for the donkey.

Go west and you've entered that which is different. Here the rain and the water, too much or too little, determines all. This is not that. The pine trees tell you when you've passed that line. Cedar is everywhere, except where it isn't, and does anyone carve these things anymore? Is there a knife that can work this stuff?

Or if mesquite, a damned axe because the fool's wood is hard enough to drive you to go find something else to do.

Tuna move into the gulf, the big ones, they spawn and move on and tempt a different kind of fool to run for days and chase the big dream. And then another generation will grow up and laugh at the stories, no one comes here to fish for bluefin in warm water. Besides all that, the hurricanes are on the way.

And through it all... here the green there the red, and the enchiladas are different in every town. Don't go for the stuffed peppers until you get west of 35? It's a rule, and it'll change I'm sure.

Thursday, May 30, 2019

Ok, I read this, on the disappearance of the crafty pitcher, by Neil Paine at fivethirtyeight, and I have a question.

Here it goes, Neil: Does this have anything to do with the use of pitch location tracking, especially by MLB for their umpires?

I remember noticing in particular the extended strike zone for Tom Glavine with the Braves. Greg Maddux wasn't as exaggerated, but Glavine's strike zone included low and outside (to right-handed pitchers) when he could get away with it.

This was noticeable because TBS would broadcast the Braves games, and we could also watch their opponents (Astros for me) on a different broadcast. The camera angles from the outfield were close, but just enough separated that I could watch replays of pitches from both angles.

The TBS cameras were located a little farther into left field than the away broadcast. Which meant that a pitch a ball or two wide on the low outside corner for a righthand batter looked to be in the strike zone on the TBS broadcast. But when you saw it from dead center through the dead center camera, you could see how wide of the plate it truly was.

Glavine knew how to expand the strike zone. A pitch that was a clear strike in the first inning was now a ball or two wider by the fifth inning, just because he would pound it over and over again, a little farther outside each time, until the umpire was calling the wide strike out of habit, as much as anything.

With a truer measurement of the strike zone, and the umpires aware of it, I wonder if this is possible to the same extent that it was? If so, a pitcher who knows how to use a little Penn and Teller magic on the umpire doesn't have the same freedom as they did a generation ago.

Hey, psst.... I've got a new book out. Look over there to the right, in My Books list, or at the next post below. It's a science fiction book, one that takes place in both inner and outer space.

And yes, I'm afraid I'm made an algebrist's pun in the titles. Well, sometimes we revert to type, I guess...

Do you know yourself?

Do you know your songs? Dreams? How to dance and leap and where you'll be when you land?

Are you sure? Are you certain?

What would have to happen... for you to jump off into the void, knowing only that you'll have the chance to come back?

What would have to happen... for you to bet your life on how well you know who you are?

Automorphs, the first volume in the Transformalisms series, is available in print and ebook from all your favorite retailers, including Amazon (print) and Amazon (ebook), Kobo, Smashwords, Lulu, Barnes and Noble.

If you don't see your favorite retailer in this list, be sure and search for it; I use Draft2Digital to distribute to a number of other retailers, as well as to the public library system distributors.

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

I realized radio silence had extended a bit on the blog.

And then I remembered that I had a pretty busy week last week. I can see writers in the world that finish a book and publish a book in the same week as a normal thing. For me at least, I'm not there yet.

So my brain demands a little space to breathe.

Well, no, that's not quite it. Oh, there's a demand for a couple days unencumbered. But there's another book brewing as well. One that I've had in the back of my mind for a few years now, but I didn't expect to be tackling quite yet.

Then again that's two in a row, when I think about it. The book I finished last week wasn't one I thought I was ready to write yet, and then it snuck up on me, bit me, and next thing I know I was chapters in and the thing wouldn't let me go until I'd told the story good and true.

I'll be putting up links and so on later in the week, so watch this space.

Thursday, May 16, 2019

Observations and notes - things I'm noting that will turn up in future work, in different ways and means. It helps to write them down.

These aren't presented as any sort of concrete thoughts meant to be important to anyone. They're just things I've seen and wondered about. I.e. half-baked noodlings that I store in the back of my brain, that may or may not be useful down the road, but if so writing the current thoughts will help me pick them back up again later. I hope only that when I reach for them in a story, these ideas are there to be played with.

Maybe. My brain could also just as well regurgitate it here and never use it again.

That said:

The muddy-boots engineering world looks to have a few interesting dynamic changes going on. Get on a plane, ignore the loud talkers who're only interested in getting to the drinks service, and watch and listen for those wearing steel-toed boots and carrying their hard hats. Especially the younger ones, those who look to be maybe on their first big-kid gig, or just a few into it. Notice the differing faces than you might expect, the different origins and, most of all, stories. As compared to last generation's faces and stories.

How's that going to look, ten, twenty, thirty years down the line? What kinds of impacts and stories will be there, how will they look and sound and think when these muddy boots engineers are training and hiring the next round? What kind of projects and where are they located, and what sort of stories are they going to be telling, in steel and pipe and dirt?

Next one:

Hiring for many jobs, out away from population centers, doesn't look like it's constrained by total population, so much as it's constrained by the population who can pass a background check and a piss test on demand. In small towns and low-population regions, that the total available local number who can do both of those things, and are interested in working out of the air-conditioning, is relatively small looks to be having a pretty significant effect on which muddy-boots jobs can be staffed effectively.

The same dynamic exists in the major population centers, broadly extending out past the exurbs, within the hour+ driving range, but the total available population that passes the piss test and the background checks and doesn't mind working outside is larger at least. It's still a constraint, and you can see the effects on staffing nonetheless. The broadening legalization of marijuana appears unlikely to change the piss test portion of the proceedings anytime soon.

Since there's no equivalent of BAC for cannabis/THC that would be broadly immunizing in terms of liability for, say, a pilot who puts a plane full of people into a lake, or a railroad engineer who derails. So, the patchwork of local laws plus unknown and, at current, essentially infinite liability for jobs DOT related (essentially any job not retail or medical or educational or similar areas adjacent, in other words) means that there's going to be a Lost Generation coming that are barred from entire industries.

And this won't be a whiff of froth on the body of the cappuccino Lost Generation (Hemingway etc), either, this looks to be something on the order of 60 percent of the population (who've smoked pot at work, according to the DJ and who knows whether that was a correct reading of whatever he was looking at), assuming the radio station survey I heard this morning is anything like representative. I'm not sure I believe it's that high, pardon the expression, but I could reasonably guess thirty percent at least that would be in trouble if you handed them the plastic cup and pointed them at the bathroom. In certain age groups, a lot higher.

Let's say it's twenty, thirty years down the road, being generous, before all the kinks get worked out and some broadly acceptable liability-assuaging parameters for marijuana use are established. That's an entire set of overlapping generations with precious few forklift operators, truck drivers, pipeline operators, plant operators, pipefitters, welders, etc. in their experience or circle.

Amazon's fulfillment center just up the road from me, I'm told, uses a completely autonomous forklift/warehouse stacking system combination. There are welding robots for big fabrication jobs. I watched a fully assembled pumping station waiting for wire hoisters to clear the road ahead of its haul truck this morning; it's headed to the municipal water station a couple miles over from my house. They'll set it in, run the pipes, and probably have it going through its pre-runs and start-ups in a week at most.

A job that would have been minimum, say, three months in a rush. With an electrician and helper, a pipefitter, couple of helpers, couple of iron workers, half a dozen concrete hands, a welder and helper, hot-shotters for the pumps and parts... Lot of jobs unseen. The slab's already been poured, I'm sure, so the concrete job's still there, the wires have to be run, and they'll need all that crew for "Just in Case", but the city won't have to hire them just for that one job, they'll use their permanent hires and fly them in for the couple weeks needed.

I'm not sure yet that I completely buy the "robots are takin' all our jobz" bit. But I do see a lot of open questions. A lot of stories coming that don't look like what we know now, or what our parents and grandparents knew. I said the municipal water service still needs the pipefitter, the welder, the iron worker. They'll always need them.

However: Next generation, a pipefitter and her helper will also have a couple robots, for grinding and cutting, while the fitters do something closer to what a foreman does now. Next generation's fitter is going to be doing a lot more high-level stuff than this one's; today's journeyman and tomorrow's apprentice are going to share a knowledge base, but they'll have a completely different level of capabilities.

And tomorrow's fitter will need it. If she's doing the work that two or three would have done yesterday, since 60 percent of the population couldn't get the job even if they wanted it.

Right, where's this headed? What sort of stories? In the cyberpunk world, who's beholden to corps and employers more? Those who can get a job broadly? Or those who can only get a certain subset of jobs? And how will a generation that's already begun to work outside of a regular employment (ie. the gig economy compared to the post-war standard) approach this world? How's the hierarchy react when there's a dominant labor pool, both necessary and available, that knows how to tell the suits to fuck right off? But that dominant labor pool is, at the very same time, a shrinking minority of the overall working population?

How does the hierarchy treat the welder who knows she can flip them the bird and go to the competitor, versus the IT worker and the administrative assistant that are effectively locked in? Or, at least, aren't necessarily going to be challenging the engineer or the welder for their job? IT isn't currently subject to this, are they? But at the very same time, the big Tech world is working like hell to make sure that IT in the next generation doesn't require a dedicated, on-site IT staff, they want everyone to be IT tomorrow, i.e. everyone to be comfortable enough with the tech so that a dedicated IT administrator isn't necessary day-to-day...

Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Some observations on the reactions of A Game of Thrones fandom, some in person, some online (and all with good humor and wishes to the fans whose theories went poof):

Team Cersei: "Really?"

Team Dany: Loudly ignoring foreshadowing since 1996!

Team Jon: The only winning move is not to play.

Teams Sansa and Tyrion: Batters Up!

Thursday, May 9, 2019

Another Game of Thrones thought (because like everyone else, I'm watching the end of the era with great interest.)

Ok, this one's about Sansa Stark. We're way past the books as published, so the show has to stand on this point.

I'm intrigued by the contrast the show poses between Sansa and Ned Stark. Recall, in the first episode of the show (and in the first book), Ned executes a deserter from the Night's Watch. In the doing, he tells the boys that he who passes the sentence should be willing to execute it.

In contrast, as the show portrays it, by the time we get to Ramsay Bolton and Petyr Bailish, Sansa does her killing at a remove. The dogs in the first case, Arya in the second.

Now, I'm not arguing why this occurs. It's pretty evident why, given Sansa's personal story. There are many arguments about how this choice fits, pretty much all of them useful and defensible on some level.

What I'm interested in is this: are the storywriters going to leave this as purely a contrast?

And I wouldn't disagree; Sansa is Sansa and Ned is Ned and leaving this obvious story arc as is, no explanation, can stand on its own.

However, this contrast can also be used. If it's a contrast, but one with possibility to be resolved in some way? Now that would be an interesting choice, as well. That's usually the way of it, in the classic tragedy sense, isn't it? And Ned's choices mattered: he paid for them. Will Sansa's matter in a similar way? Or are the writers headed for a different path.

Again, this contrast doesn't have to be anything except a pure character statement. At the same time, it can be a fulcrum to pivot around, in the way the story goes. Which one would you choose?

Monday, May 6, 2019

Hie thee North, Jon Snow.

Do what Rhaegar and Lyanna couldn't quite manage; what Ned Stark should have done but couldn't bring himself to: win the war if you must, but then pack up your shit and head North. Not to Winterfell, leave that to Sansa and Arya to figure out. Go wildling. Join up with the Free Folk as just another sword, a nobody from nowhere.

Don't leave a forwarding address. Don't wait around to celebrate the dead or the living. Get on the first horse you can find and leave the squabbling to those who revel in it.

You have Aemon's example. You have Mance Rayder's example. You've been told repeatedly that you're no Stark, beginning with Catelyn. Even Ned was getting ready to tell you that you're something else besides. Take it, live it, and leave all the rest behind.

Just my opinion, based only on what the books tell me. I have no expectation that either George or the showrunners will follow up on the trail of crumbs that seems to be there for Jon.

Thursday, May 2, 2019

I think I'm going to start calling the phenomenon of "dude country" something else. (dude here used advisedly, there are several female singers who have constructed their own versions of the phenomenon. I think dude works here in the BillNTed *Dude* sense, if nothing else. Further, I am being descriptive here, not trying to express an opinion.)

I think I'm going to call it Audrey's Revenge.

There's a bit to unpack here. First, by "dude country" I mean the shirt-popping, chest-thumping song, video, and stagecraft style of many country songs and singers these days. It's a little grating when it's becoming a dominant public-facing form of a music that was usually supposed to be known for being a little more adult than pop. How did "He Stopped Loving Her Today" and "Whiskey Lullaby" turn into forty different iterations on the "Red Solo Cup"?

So be it, not my bag and I'm not ragging on the musicians. They've got checks to cash and bills to pay and an audience that's willing to pony up for it.

That said, the particular cultural style (and it is a conscious, very well polished, stylistic choice) is, from observation, descended from one particular person: Hank Williams, Jr.

Hank Junior appears from this seat to have consciously constructed his act, both musically and in terms of stagecraft, and in terms of the audience he courted.

This audience thing happened later, after Hank Junior became the first person to win back-to-back Entertainer of the Year awards from the CMA. That's when the videos and the self-parody stage set in, again from what I saw.

But Hank Junior did, and does, appear to have a very good idea of the sort of audience that was paying attention to him when that self-parody image began to grow out of control. While Hank Junior ultimately stepped away from that image, except for the Monday Night Football Cash-In which was, let's face it, a once a year video performance, there were plenty of acts (the class of 1989 being the most prominent) who stepped in to fill the void.

Consciously, I'd argue. People tend to go where the money is. And then later, where their idols went. Which is now the generation of artists we're into now.

Ok, that's the immediate phenomenon. Audrey, as in Audrey's Revenge, is Audrey Williams, Hank Junior's mother.

And the reason I think Audrey's Revenge is appropriate is that Nashville basically kicked Hank Williams Senior out of town (literally: 'They' kicked him out of the Grand Ole Opry).

Like Mick Jagger said, if you don't like Hank Williams (Senior), you can kiss my ass. And, at least metaphorically, you could read the "dude country" phenomenon as Audrey's Revenge on the town as a whole.

Of course, to read it that way, you probably have to be the kind of person who knows why Johnny Cash and Rick Rubin put out a full-page spread in Billboard Magazine flipping the bird to the entire industry...

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

In my current work-in-progress, I hit a stretch of the book where I found myself grinning. For what's going on in the story, and for the way it's unfolding. I recognized what was happening and how I wanted to see it play out in the doing of it. And that is a very fun feeling.

I'll give more detail as I get through it. More or less? halfway through? I think? Maybe. In a stage where I'm hip deep in it and am more interested in the doing and the telling than I am talking about it. Another of the fun parts of this whole business, at my present stage of craft it's my brain's way of saying "shh...working...shut up and write..."

On a different note: one of the little joys of the modern world are the streaming music services. I grew up on FM radio; really, streaming with my headphones on is no different than a transistor radio with an earplug. Considering that I don't mind listening to the commercials, in fact it's almost exactly the same.

Except... except for the kind of day I had on Sunday. Working in the yard, earbuds as much hearing protection as anything as I was using an electric saw and drills and so on, and my streaming service (I've been on Pandora since the gang there migrated from the original graduate school project, not an endorsement just info, everyone's got their favorites by this point) seemed to be fascinated with Concrete Blonde and Marvin Gaye. At one point, Pandora took me from "What's Going On" through "Inner City Blues" (both Marvin Gaye), then "Just My Imagination" (Temptations) and "Evangeline" (Levon Helm and Emmylou Harris), to finally finish up on "Bloodletting" (Concrete Blonde).

Ever a fan of pirate and college radio, I have to admit that even the best DJ would have a hard time keeping up with the things that shuffle up from the deck that the streaming services give us.

Saturday, April 27, 2019

A notes and bolts followup to that last piece might be useful.

Ok, when you start out a musician, you run into "covers or originals." If you play cover songs, it's a little easier to get to the hundred dollar a night stage. I speak here of pop/rock/country/etc. Jazz is a little different, but the basic structure is similar up to a point.

Originals is a different bag, and a rougher road. Many music venue owners would rather pay the songwriter royalties for cover bands than put up with the raw stages of beginning originals acts.

But the venues that do host original acts are gold.

Now, cover bands get to a little better money, sooner, but there's a cap on what they can make. Originals don't have that cap, assuming they can keep working to larger venues, get label attention, or best of all a combination. And these days, break their own audience and pass the labels by entirely.

That's the economics of it in a nutshell. The songwriting part of it is the interesting part. You write with the ones you're rehearsing with. If you hear a band in their breakout period, or an individual who's scratched their way to that level, you're hearing the songs that they wrote in that blood and beer and bruises stage. All for one and one for all.

And that's the part that's the hardest to keep going. Because at a certain point, they're no longer writing as a team. In many cases, they don't even see each other until soundcheck.

The frictions start to magnify, and that magic team effort tends to come apart under the new stresses. It's a rough way to run a business.

Individual performers have a little different path, then. Some ways easier, because their process doesn't have the dependence on others. But at the same time, they still have to learn to listen to a voice that's changed.