Episode #128: Dad Is Behind And Is Willing To Make A Deal?

One of my favorite modern cartoon characters. Actually used this pic as wallpaper on my smartie phone. One of the few remaining items that I still have from when I was dating my wife back in the late 80's. I miss those days when cartoons were still relatively good.

Anyways, today's post is simply gonna be a panster kind of slap-dash goodness. Why? Well, I actually had a post that was all set to go as recently as Saturday night, was set to be published. But, it really didn't meet my minimal standard of lucidity. It started promising, but crashed quicker than Carter 2.0's presidency, of which we'll have to suffer through for two more years max. So, it got nuked, which is an actual rarity in my blogging. This makes like only the 3rd post in the past 12+ years to be nuked from any of my blogs.

But, such is the blogging life. So, here I is, attempting to do a free-form blog post, and hoping like the sulfuric land beneath our collective feet, I does average.

Let's start things out by updating everyone on my word count for my Hot Mess project. For six chapters completely transcribed I currently sit at almost 25k, I have one that I'm a third of the way through transcribing and two others in the on deck circle waiting for their turn at the plate.

So...as I'm sitting here trying to decide what to write about next, one particular thought has popped into my head. Well, two actually, but we're gonna touch lightly on one and probably expand on it in a future post, and we'll try to touch on the second one as well.

So let's daytrip back to the decade of 2010. Things were just starting to get interesting with my writing, as I started making a genuine attempt at working in the various topics that I was currently reading/listening/seeing into my stories, and this one was proving to be no exception, or problem for that matter.

I somehow started getting into using hybrid characters, which in this case were half animal/half human right about the time I started really getting into one of only two shows of the Star Trek universe I actually enjoyed: Deep Space Nine (the other being Next Generation). With that series, they were using different species (as per the norm) but were also using a symbiont species as well. I found that intriguing, so I tried to work that into a few of my stories (with moderate success).

At roughly the same time, I started working in my vision to the concepts of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, into my stories as well. I admit, I was intrigued by Dante's work and took off from there. I also was fascinated by some of the grosser concepts of other ancient peoples (e.g. Aztecs), so I started working those in as well.

Also, I really wanted to tweak our current world to where having a different species living in our world was considered to be normal (like the show Alien Nation). And what could be better than having two different worlds collide, so to speak? Well, that particular box got checked as well. And off we were to the races.

In one aspect, I'm having a good time rediscovering what originally made me tick, and to a large degree, still makes me tick a decade later. And what makes me tick is something that I'll expand and expound upon in another post. In another, I'm finding that something that I had no problems with writing about ten plus years later, I'm having small issues as well, and yes, that will be touched upon as well.

Now, for the other topic we will touch upon: sound, be it music or sports.

Prior to 2021, my writing routine included having no background noise, of any kind whatsoever, while I write. Ya know, dead (or unalive as the grammar police on social media now dictate, and we ALL KNOW who the grammar police on social media are) silence. I needed an atmosphere of total quiet in order to write, or writing wasn't going to happen.

Well, as most of you know, our house suffered through major water damage in the basement via a corroded kitchen water-pipe in the summer of '21. Because of that, my base of operations had to be moved to the dining room for what turned out to be about 5 1/2 months.

Now of course, being on the main floor of my house was detrimental to my well being in a myriad of ways. First off, people. Secondly, people on television. Thirdly, more people. So naturally, I had to find a way to deaden the voices to the point where I could actually write. Well, this is where we went down the rabbit hole that is YT music. Long story short, I listened to more classical/fantasy/role playing/instrumental/medieval music in those 5 1/2 months than I did in the previous 57 years of living on this planet.

Major side effect of listening to the 12 music notes including the corresponding flats and sharps in forms too numerous to mention, is that now I need sound, which are those previously mentioned musical notes plus baseball games (I don't like the other three majors), in order to both write and transcribe. Which means I'm revisiting my c.d.'s as well exploring the SomaFM internet radio station, with 30+ channels of....stuff (explore the station and you'll quickly understand the long ellipses) for me to get semi-irritated with, as well as the TuneIn Radio app.

So, yeah, sound is now my frenemy. The real challenge will really be once I come to the point where I have to actually create fresh new product from scratch, because presently I'm just re-writing/copying what's already written, which is why I need the sound so I"m not getting lost in the windmills of my mind.

And thus, our hero, having shed a flashlight to a tiny bit of the darkness of his writing world, will now exit the computer screen to Albuquerque, stage right. Oh and, I promise to deep dive these twin topics in the coming weeks. Which could be a scary thing indeed.

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