Blogging Toward Bethlehem

I t's been a busy week. Grace had a doctor's appointment to get her botox shot -- which she gets in her back, for recurring pain. Now that the weather had gotten milder, we've been working on our garden. And Grace has been laboring to finish her Author's Information page for her publisher, who needs it to publicize her novel, Visible Signs . And me? I've signed -- or rather, am just about to sign -- a contract for a two-book deal with Readict . Readict is an iPhone-based app with which users can download chunks of a published work. Think serialized novels, in the mode of Charles Dickens, whose stuff was serialized in newspapers prior to being published in book form. My two books -- The Bohemian Magician  and Time-Lost High  -- will be coded for Readict. Bohemian , for which I did literally years of research, was originally published in 2017, but cut loose by the publisher from their list after I refused to write the sequel, The Legacy of Sycorax , to their direction...

A t age 71, I figure I need about another 30 years of life so that I could finish everything I want to do with my creative projects.* Most of those are writing projects; a number of books I want to write / revise. I also want to get back to painting. But who knows how far I'll get. Like most farty old men my age, I'm concerned with legacy . I have a shit-ton of stuff in my files (some of which I almost lost last night due to some flooding in our basement during a heavy rainstorm), much of it artwork -- I do have some manuscripts, but since switching over to computer-based word processing about thirty years ago, pretty much everything I have written exists on floppy disks or in digital files on a hard drive. The problem with digital files is that the damn technology keeps  evolving . You know, a typewriter was a typewriter, and if you could work one you could work pretty much any other (unless it was in a different language), but we started losing our way with electronic storage...

T his has been quite a week. It's now been shown that the Blue Wall of Silence may be developing some cracks. I do hope so, because I think it would be good for our country if that were to happen/ Then again, I am not holding my breath. I have been doing a little artwork for a change, on a freelance basis. It's nice to get back to it, even if only temporarily. Otherwise I've been hacking away at a short story and submitting finished ones. A couple of my wife's sisters are coming to visit for a few days beginning this coming Friday, so there has been much cleaning of the house and sprucing up of the yard. Otherwise things proceed apace. Of late I have been feeling the shadows of my life growing longer. There have been mental shifts and upheavals as I plan for the next few years of creative effort. How much will I get done? I want to get back to painting, but that requires a certain mind-set that I haven't managed to work my way into just yet. God knows what sort of d...

W ell, I'm a day late with this blog update but that's just the way it goes. Yesterday was a busy day, what with discussing possible fiction collaborations, getting stuff done around the house before Grace's sisters arrive next week for a visit, and so on. More important than all that stuff, however, if the fact that a few hours ago, NASA's tiny helicopter I ngenuity  took off for a short flight, the first flight of an aircraft on another world. Here's a link to the Facebook link to Space.com. A lot of happy scientists are on view. In other news, I finished reading  Astounding , Alec Nevala-Lee's book about the influences on Golden Age sf by John W. Campbell, Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, Isaac Asimov and others, for an upcoming review in the fanzine Portable Storage . Quite a good book. * I'm working on a short story of my own, titled The Liar, The Bitch and the Warbot . The title popped into my head a year or so ago. I started writing a draft two days ...

T here comes a time in every man's life when he must paint a ceiling. This is not my favorite kind of painting to do, especially at my age. But I accepted the challenge, moved all the stuff out of the dining room (except for the breakfront, which is just too big) and had at it. I'm done now, after one full coat and one partial one to cover up a few spots I missed. If you've never painted a ceiling, let me congratulate you. It's arduous, even for such a small room as the one in which we dine. But It's done now, and with any luck I won't have to paint any more ceilings in this life. More important that the dining room ceiling is the news that my wife, Grace Marcus, is going to have her first novel published later this year. The book is titled  Available Light ,   and the publisher is Family of Light, which sounds religious but isn't. Grace has published shorter works before, including a few in collaboration with me. She's looking forward to having her book...

N ow that I have this blog up and running (perhaps in the sense that the toilet keeps running until you have to jiggle the handle), I'm going to use it to store some links. First, here's my page at the Internet Science Fiction Database : http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?704 Not all of my publications are listed there, but many of them are. I need to update the thing, but I've forgotten how to do it so I'll have to spend some time tinkering with it at some point Real Soon Now. Secondly, I want to note that I am almost done ghostwriting my third paranormal cozy mystery. With luck I'll finish it this week and dispatch it to my client. I've been taking notes for my own cozy series, and I intend to get one of those done before the end of the year -- God willing and the creek don't rise. Thirdly, I have been thinking about the science fiction genre of late. When I started writing, all of the fields "greats" were still alive: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein.....

A fter I moved to New Haven CT in 1973 the first thing I needed to do was get a job. I see I have to back up a little... I'd had a good job while I was living in Bridgeport prior to 1973; I worked in the Classified Display Department of the Bridgeport Post-Telegram newspaper (the Telegram being the morning paper and the Post the evening paper). I got that job by being willing to quit college after my sophomore year. The money was good; the job was probably better than one I would have been able to get after 4 years of college. Once I had a good job, I immediately moved out of my parents' home in Fairfield, CT. I rented a rather crummy house in Bridgeport with three other guys I knew from college--the University of Bridgeport, where I had been majoring in Graphic Design. The house was near what was in those days called the Beardsley Park Zoo in the North End. So now I was heading off to work every days wearing a tie and a pressed shirt--but with hair spilling down past my sho...

I am a working writer. I didn't used to be. When I started out--well, before that; when I was still trying to be published--I wasn't able to write to market. Chris Fox, who coined the term, meant by it analyzing the market, and using that information to write books that readers want to read. For example, if I wanted to write a paranormal romance, I would go to Amazon, buy the top three books in that particular category, then take that information and use it to write a paranormal romance that would as it were tick all the boxes in that genre, thus making the book more likely to sell. Effective? Apparently so. Cynical? Yes. But--if you want to sell your work, what better way than to figure out how what is selling sells, then come as close as you can to the tropes. I can't personally speak to the efficaciousness of this method, but I do know that when I got interested in cozy mysteries a few months ago, I purchased a book recommended to me by one of my ghostwriting clients, W...